Recent Exhibitions
About
Grason Ratowsky is an American painter living and working between New York City and Mallorca, Spain. He works in the lineage of American Expressionism and postwar European painting. His practice centers on process-driven painting, emphasizing movement, pressure, accumulation, and layered depth, allowing images to emerge through physical engagement rather than predetermined form. While rooted in expressionist logic, his work sustains slippage between abstraction, figuration, and surreal recognition. Working at large scale, his paintings maintain tension between bodily gesture and emergent imagery, foregrounding process as both structure and content.
Ratowsky’s practice is grounded in sustained physical engagement with the painted surface. He begins each work instinctively, working without predetermined imagery and building layered fields of activity through motion, erasure, and reassertion. As the painting develops, the process slows and compresses. Forms are reduced, reorganized, and pulled forward through subtraction and adjustment, allowing figuration to be extracted from the painted field rather than composed in advance.
When figuration appears, it operates as a carrier of psychological weight rather than description. Ratowsky is less concerned with depicting subjects than with sustaining tension—holding images in a state of instability between recognition and ambiguity. Figures hover between presence and collapse, advancing through cycles of force and restraint in which each decision remains provisional and subject to revision.
His paintings resist closure, remaining open to abrasion, doubt, and revision. The surface retains the marks of its own making, foregrounding process as both structure and content. Meaning is not resolved but held in suspension, accumulating through proximity, duration, and repeated looking. Through this approach, Ratowsky’s work asks the viewer to remain with the painting long enough for its internal logic to surface.
Ratowsky has exhibited internationally in the United States, Europe, and Asia. His work is held in private and institutional collections and has appeared on the secondary market.
I never chose to be an artist, it’s simply who I’ve always been. I received my passion for creativity naturally. I was so enveloped in the arts from growing up around the world with artist parents, that I always believed art was life and vice versa. For me there was never a differentiation between the two.
Process has always been an indispensable part of my life and work. I believe true creativity is revealed through discovery and surprise, through experience. The necessity of listening, realizing and unearthing as you go delivers one to find creative opportunity and solutions that would otherwise not be possible. Process offers a framework for navigation and a veritable tranquility in the chaos of creation.
From a wide lens view, this process has taken me through endless facets and layers within the world of art and design. With over 20 years professionally engaging in these industries, I’ve had the unique pleasure of wearing many hats, experiencing many achievements and learning from many failures. This process has allowed me to collaborate with some of the greatest visionaries of our time and open a window to the public into my art & life.
I continue to make art consistently via various avenues from my main studio located in a 17th century sheep feeding den – in the heart of Mallorca, Spain.
If you are interested in my work or have a project that you’d like to collaborate on, please Contact Me to see if it’s a good fit.
