Joe Grieve
ARTIST PROFILE
Joe Grieve(b. 1997, UK — Lives and works in London)
Joe Grieve is a painter of rare intensity, one of those artists for whom the act of painting is a compulsion. He holds a First-Class Honours Degree from the City & Guilds Art School in London, though his true education has taken place in the field — on riverbanks and moorlands, in mountain ranges and coastal margins, in the shifting light of the British Isles and far beyond.
Grieve's practice is grounded in sustained, often physical engagement with the natural world, approached not as subject matter but as an active field of forces and relations. His paintings attend to systems that operate beyond immediate visibility — electromagnetic currents, mycelial networks, quantum behaviours — and ask how these invisible structures underpin the lived experience of being in a landscape. Working across expressive mark making and abstraction within a post-impressionist lineage, his practice is at once intuitive and formed deep within the subconscious, building surfaces through countless layers that register both the physical memory of a place and the sensory and energetic conditions that define it.
Rather than representing nature, Grieve proposes painting as a site of translation — where scientific speculation, embodied perception, and spiritual resonance converge into something wholly felt. His canvases draw together opposites: the peace and fury of peaks and depths, the tangible and intangible, the surface world and the hidden networks that sustain it. The result is work that is at once recognisable and otherworldly, rooted in the landscape of these islands and reaching far beyond it.
Grieve was the first Colstoun Artist in residence in October 2022 — a formative and, for us, unforgettable few weeks that shaped the ambition of everything that followed here. He returned in 2024 for The Other Side, his first Scottish solo exhibition, staged in the Coach House at Colstoun House. It remains one of the most remarkable things we have had the privilege of presenting. In 2025 saw a major solo exhibition with LBF Contemporary in London — One's Own Mystery — confirmed his position as one of the most compelling painters working in Britain today.
His work is held in collections across five continents and in private collections in over twenty countries.
Selected Exhibitions
Solo:
One's Own Mystery — LBF Contemporary, London (2025)
The Otherside — Colstoun Arts, Haddington, Scotland (2024)
Between Place & Time — BWG Gallery, London (2023)
Somewhere Near Perception — BWG Gallery, London (2022)
Help A Brother Out — Artisan Space, London (2019)
Group:
Residents — Colstoun Arts, Scotland (2024)
NATURALCULTURAL NIGHTS II — BWG Gallery, London (2024)
LBF @ The Lake II — LBF Contemporary, Muskoka, Canada (2025)
LBF @ The Lake — LBF Contemporary, Muskoka, Canada (2024)
Apocalyptic Changes of State — BWG Gallery, London (2024)
Iteration — The Florence Trust, London C&G Graduation Show, London (2025)
Residencies:
Azores Residency (2023)
Blackwater Valley Residency, Ireland (2022)
Colstoun Artist Residency, Scotland (2022)
