Charles Avery: Where Rocco Found a Dead Monster OR The Land of the Downcast Eyes
GRIMM is pleased to announce Where Rocco Found a Dead Monster OR The Land of the Downcast Eyes, a solo exhibition by Charles Avery, on view at the Amsterdam gallery from October 9 through November 14, 2026.
For two decades Charles Avery devoted his practice to describing — through drawing, writing and sculptural objects — the inhabitants, topography and culture of a fictional Island. Then, in 2024, he set The Islanders aside to begin a new project which he refers to as The Eidolons. As the artist has stated: 'Within this matrix, one picture — or proposition — gives rise to the next, establishing a community of interrelated forms — a primitive universe of simple and numerable parts, which will develop to create an utterly legible account of its own existence.’
In this solo exhibition, Avery presents a suite of works that provide a conceptual bridge between the two opposite worlds of The Islanders and The Eidolons — a way by which we can relate these apparently discrete and incommensurate visions.
The scene of this co-existence is a non-place called Where Rocco Found a Dead Monster, an endless and monotonous wilderness defined by vivid skies, arid steppes and little else. Beneath the horizon there is occasional life: meadows of white flowers bend in the wind, ambiguous beasts graze, travellers, herders and a frontiersman pass by. That which is above the horizon is given to the Eidolons: strange yet simple, these impassive, ethereal forms shimmer and shift against the moody sky.
Within this hybrid pictorial space, it is ambiguous as to whether the two existences are accessible to — or even aware of — one another. Perhaps the Eidolons are just so familiar to the people that traverse the plain, as common as the weather, that they don’t bother to look up. Maybe the Eidolons are visible only to us, the viewer, with an insight conferred by the third dimension.
As with all of his work, Avery creates a delicate semantic balance, a game of dimensions, that refuses to commit to a particular reading, whilst insisting on meaning for meaning’s sake.
About the artist
Charles Avery (b. 1973 in Oban, UK) lives and works in London and on the Island of Mull (UK). Selected solo exhibitions include The Eidolorama, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh (UK); The Eidola, Pigs and Blades of the Inner Vast, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); The Nothing of the Day, GRIMM, London (UK); Zoo, Hat, Bridge, Tree: Architectural Propositions of Onomatopoeia, Vistamarestudio, Milan (IT).
Selected group exhibitions include You Must Change Your Life, curated by Tom Morton, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); As Above, So Below, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (US); One Thing Touches Another, Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY (US); In Other Worlds: Acts of Translation, The Roberts Institute of Art, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (UK); A Room Hung With Thoughts: British Painting Now, curated by Tom Morton, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (US); Size Matters | Monument Drawing Now, Museum MORE, Gorssel (NL); My World, curated by Hans den Hartog Jager, Singer Museum, Laren, (NL); GLASSTRESS: Venetian Glass Today, Millesgården Museum, Lidingö (SE); Cubitt 30th Birthday Fundraising Exhibition, Victoria Miro, London (UK); Planet B. Climate Change and the New Sublime, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, Palazzo Bollani, Venice (IT) and We, on the Rising Wave, Busan Biennale 2022, Busan (SK).
His work is part of numerous public and institutional collections, including Tate, London (UK); National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (UK); Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (NL); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (NL); Kunstmuseum, The Hague (NL); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (NL); Arts Council Collection, London (UK); The Government Art Collection (UK); FRAC Île-de-France, Paris (FR); KADIST Art Foundation, Paris (FR) and San Francisco, CA (US); Deutsche Bank Collection, Frankfurt am Main (DE); AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); The David and Indrė Roberts Collection, London (UK); THE EKARD COLLECTION; among others.
