"Anne Grgich is one of the most original and innovative of the group of American artists known as Outsiders. Completely self-taught, and on the cover story of Raw Vision Magazine (#22), she became known for her one-of-a-kind books filled with page after page of impassioned, expressionistic faces and figures. Grgich often employs collage and vigorously applies layer after layer of over-painting, covering found texts and images, yet allowing some of the underneath to remain visible. This layering suggests generations of mystery and mystique to her exotic characters." -Phil Demise-Smith, Gallery A Studio

Life pulsating, troubled, exalting – work by Anne Marie Grgich<br>
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Crown Yourself is a truly enigmatic picture. It is Victorian rather than oriental in feel; a vision of a goddess out of some fin-de-siècle drawing room stuffed with an eclectic mix of furniture and décor from Europe, India and the East nestled among aspidistra plants in rare china pots. Yet, this visage is a breathing, living presence. Two large eyes stare steadily out at the viewer, their twin green mandala irises inviting us to plunge through and experience the cosmic plenitude they seem to promise – perhaps to discover something about our own soul in the process. The great mouth might be open wide in the act of utterance. Or is it closed, in a more profound silence, with great, dark green lips edged only by a thin, pink penumbra? If you move up close to those lips two lines of fractured words appear. Partly illegible, like a visual stutter, they reveal enough to intrigue us, but explain nothing: ‘the heart and stomach … Parma, or Spain, or any prince of Europe’. At the same time much is apparently revealed of the interior life of the figure – the vast atrium of a domed, Romanesque church, a simple drawn portrait face of a man, a head of the Buddha in the centre of her forehead. Though what, exactly, we are left to intuit for ourselves.<br>
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<br>This same sense of connection and a desire for dialogue penetrates the viewer who spends time with any of Anne Marie Grgich’s mixed media collage paintings. Titles like Chesapeake, Kitty Queen, and Aparition only add to the sense of questioning that is an abiding result of contact. Yet, her works have a depth and complexity, arising out of an essentially straightforward method of construction, that reward long contemplation with the promise of a kind of revelation. Characteristically this group of works consists of a single, forceful hieratic image – most often a female face – constructed out of a mixture of decorative and graphic elements that function simultaneously as constitutive parts of the main form and as distinct images in themselves. In this way a kind of push and pull of vision is set up that produces continued movement from the whole to the part, which is itself also a whole.<br>
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<br>If visuality is privileged texture is also important. Anne’s work is distinctly physical and often luscious in its surfaces, so that the viewer wants to touch as well as look. Sometimes this has unexpected effects. For example, though it is jewel-like to look at, the actual surface of Crown Yourself is wrinkled like old, cold skin. Similarly there are a number of handmade books whose intense imagery in saturated pigments is overlaid on Braille text: vision collides with its absence. In this case, the touching viewer encounters remnants of the regular embossed dots of Braille text, working against the impasto of the image. The Braille reader, presumably, would encounter a torn textual fragment among the lumps and furrows of impasto. In each case, we are left with a powerful reassertion of the senses of touch and sight.<br>
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<br>Born in Portland, Oregon in 1961, Anne Grgich began making spontaneous art at the age of fifteen, mostly by clandestinely painting in her family’s books, or making junk constructions. She first introduced collage into her work around 1988, but took it to a higher level in 1997 during a period of illness. During her convalescence she worked in bed, making paintings on file cards and CD’s and organising collages from material she had collected. When she had recovered, later that year she began to produce collage paintings – images of people encountered over time in the street and in mind journeys that manifest themselves and recombine, according to her mood, in the process of creation. Recently, she has described her faces and people as ‘manifestations of conglomerated persona, in a way acting out these characters’. In a way they are a displacement for action in the world out there; fragments of experience, thought and interaction brought together to produce new possibilities out of contemplation. As she puts it, ‘bundling images, separating them’, then looking for ‘interrelating pieces to build meaning and feeling’. Seen separately these faces are individually commanding, but seen together, they form not so much a series of portraits as a group of living presences.<br>
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<br>In practice the works operate on a very shallow picture space; everything takes place on or near the picture surface, with any depth produced mostly by a literal layering of materials and the incongruous introduction of perspective in some of the collaged elements, as in Aparition (1997), whose facial skin is rendered from a heady mix of collaged fragments of reproductions of Old Master paintings. Collage helps to effect an almost alchemical transformation in the works, through its function as sign, to its active involvement in the dialogue between paint, drawing and resin. In Crown Yourself, for example, a print of a decorative architectural detail also provides the shape of the somewhat feline nose of the woman’s face, whilst the cheeks consist mainly of two halves of a decorative plate and decoupage prints of apple blossom, a rose, and a ginger cat. Resin is often introduced to seal individual layers, enabling untroubled work at the next stage up, whilst also making complete effacement of previous work impossible. In this way the process might be likened to the growth of towns, where succeeding populations establish new levels above the old, through which traces of the past nevertheless show. Thus, actual depth is established on the picture surface, with a number of results. In Crown Yourself the living, penetrating eyes clearly consist of at least three separate layers of work. Other elements, on the contrary, are subtly buried in the whole by the smoothing effect of the resin, or encased like fading memories.<br>
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<br>Collage can be a powerful force for a creator who is interested in the chance encounter and the production of new meaning out of the unexpected, rather than the banal re-rehearsing of the commonplace. In Anne Grgich’s work collage, when bound together by paint, resin and pen, often provides the equivalent of a city walk; a distillation of the little marginalia of experience, things noticed out of the corner of one’s eye, as well as more expectedly assertive phenomena. This is especially powerful at times in her handmade books, which can look like a little pile of discarded packaging at first glance, but which reveal a rich treasure when opened and pored over. ‘Practicality and simplicity’ have, as she says, influenced her style, driven by the need for visual clarity and lack of space and materials. On one level, therefore, she makes books ‘partially because I can squeeze twenty paintings in a 20 x 25 cm book’.<br>
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<br>The book format also introduces a further element of interactivity in the encounter with Anne’s work. They are made out of the individual experience of their creator, but are pregnant with the possibility of endless narrative journeys in the hands of each person who picks them up. In these ‘narratives’ anything is possible: cigar labels jostle with warnings about locks and fragments of ancient wallpaper patterns of a rural idyll; beads, string, and sticks of gum are embedded in resin laid over collaged images; a woman’s face is painted over various elements, from candy wrappers to a vaguely pornographic moving image of a woman posing with a car, which then rejoin the game of representation and memory. A fragment of admonitory text on this last page might serve as a guide for approaching all of Anne’s work: ‘Don’t ask why’. However, do ask any other question of these enigmatic images, and do explore with opened eyes and mind.<br>
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Colin Rhodes<br>
2 January 2005<br>