Malcolm Le Grice is known for his avant-garde films, as well as his prodigious work as a film historian, theorist and writer. Born in Plymouth, he began his career as a painter whilst studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. By the late 1960s, Le Grice began to move freely between – and often combining – paint, printed matter, film and digital media. With a practice marked by innovation and an extreme embrace of experimentation, Le Grice’s efforts expressed a radical desire to move beyond traditional media in the age of cybernetics, yet his work has been typically located outside a gallery context, from cinema screenings and film festivals to lecture halls. In addition to his fine art practice, Le Grice has written extensively, including an in-depth publication on the history of experimental cinema: Abstract Film and Beyond (1977, Studio Vista and MIT). In the 1970s, he wrote a regular column for Studio International and published numerous articles on digital media. Many of these have been collected as an anthology under the title Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age by the British Film Institute (2001). Le Grice is Professor Emeritus of the University of the Arts London, where he collaborates with Director David Curtis of the British Artists Film and Video Study Collection.
Le Grice has shown in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including ‘Film in Space,’ Camden Arts Centre, London (2012) and ‘Behind the Facts: Interfunktionen’ at Fondación Juan Miró, Barcelona, Spain (2004), which travelled to Fundação Serralves, Porto, Portugal, Kusthalle Friedricianum, Kassel, Germany and Museum of Modern Art, Bogota, Columbia; ‘Shoot Shoot Shoot,’ Tate Modern, London (2002); ‘Live in Your Head,’ Whitechapel Gallery, London (2000); ‘La couleur au cinéma’, Louvre, Paris (1995), and many others. His films are in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Royal Belgian Film Archive, the National Film Library of Australia, the German Cinamatheque Archive and the Archives du Film Experimental D'Avignon. A number of Le Grice's longer films have been transmitted on British TV, including Finnegans Chin, Sketches for a Sensual Philosophy and Chronos Fragmented.
The artist passed away on December 3, 2024.
Visit the artist's website at http://www.malcolmlegrice.com/.