GRANT MUDFORD
#1 C.K. WILDE 2015
24 x 36 ARCHIVAL PIGMENT INKS ON SATIN PAPER
EDITION OF 30, TITLE WITH DATE, ARTIST’S SIGNATURE, ALL ON BACK OF PRINT IN INK
$5000
GRANT MUDFORD.
“This is a portrait of C.K. Wilde. Like a lot of good artists, he’s very obsessed in what he’s doing. I can’t recall any art that he’s made that is not a collage. And primarily, as a source of collage material, he has used maps from all over the world. Both global maps and city maps and you name it. He’s always acquiring maps and cutting them up. And currency, too. I said, ‘What about you lay on the studio floor here, and I’ll get this drum full of all these cuttings and I’ll just pour them all over you. And we’ll arrange them so that we have a pile of the cuttings but see a bit of your face.’”
That’s Grant Mudford on “CK Wilde, 2015.” He explains that his wife, then a prominent art dealer, would show him the photographs to accompany exhibition one-sheets and opening invites. Grant felt dissatisfied that the photos showed solely the artwork, sans the artist. He knew the images would not only pop, but tell a much richer story, by showing both. So began a catalogued series of artist portraits that he would shoot over a ten-year period, from 2007-2017.
In “CK Wilde, 2015,” we see first a mess of collage material, then, poking out from behind it, buried in it, as it were, the bespectacled face of Wilde. It’s definitely comical, but also a window into Wilde’s psyche. He looks right at home under all those cuttings. We get the sense that this might be what Wilde sees when he shuts his eyes.
“I think this picture is very successful in showing an artist who is absolutely absorbed or submerged, really, into the medium that they’re working in,” says Mudford.
Born and raised in Sydney, Grant developed an interest in photography as a child, and turned the laundry into a darkroom at the age of ten. In his teens he photographed children on Santa Claus’s lap at Christmas. After studying architecture at the University of NSW from 1963–1964, he chose to focus on photography, opening his own studio in Sydney and working widely in advertising, fashion, magazine editorial and theatre.
Grant’s primarily known for his large-format, abstract depictions of the urban landscape or built environment, often rendered in rich black-and-white and microscopic sharpness. “They’re street scenes, nondescript mundane architecture with no pedigree. Most of my work is not subject-based, put it that way,” says the artist. His photographs are within numerous private and public collections including: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, The George Eastman House, The Nelson-Atkins Museum and The National Museum of American Art.
Now 78, Grant remains as jazzed on photography as he was in his early twenties. “There’s this magic that takes place when something gets photographed because it becomes something else. It’s no longer reality. And sometimes it’s kind of boring, but sometimes it is transformational—and becomes something very powerful.”
— Jaimie Brisick 2023