The British Film Institute (BFI) describes Malcolm Le Grice (b.1940) as "probably the most influential modernist filmmaker in British cinema". Since the mid-1960s, a period in which he showed his first, groundbreaking short films at the London Arts Lab, an influential hub for the capital's counterculture, and founded the workshop at the London Filmmakers Co-operative, Le Grice has been exploring the intersection of art, science and technology.

His entire catalogue of 80-plus films is now held in the British Film Archive as well as being represented in the permanent collections of the Tate, the Archives of the American Academy, the Royal Belgian Archive, the Museum Of Modern Art in New York, the Pompidou Museum in Paris and MoMA in Barcelona.

Born in Plymouth and a resident of Thurlestone between 1999 and 2022, Malcolm Le Grice returns to Devon this Autumn for a very special exhibition at the Velarde Gallery in Kingsbridge. DNA : AND — Malcolm Le Grice, Selected Works 1960-2024 presents video installations, selected 2D work, including original and recently rediscovered early paintings and drawings, and limited edition prints from some of his most celebrated films.

Le Grice's work interrogates the complex relationships between the processes of filmmaking and the politics of perception. Exploding the structures of conventional, linear, narrative-driven cinema, his films set out to question what it is that happens when the spectator engages with something, or as he puts it "the moment of encounter".

A colourist in the tradition of Matisse and the Post-impressionists, Le Grice is an artist who combines the sensibilities of theorist, philosopher, scientist and software engineer. Powerful expressions of sensuality, emotion and memory provide a striking counterpoint to the rational, structural nature of his work.

The exhibition reveals links between Le Grice's frequently exhibited and often large scale works and finds echoes in previously unseen early drawings and very recent prints, which take up themes such as Faces, Bathers, Punks and Jazz. The performative, improvisational nature of jazz, which saw Le Grice play in bands as a young man, has been an enduring influence on his oeuvre.

The rediscovered drawings, drawn mostly from the 1960s, resist a simple thematic interpretation but seem to echo parallel interests in the science of DNA, which Le Grice spent much time studying as a student at The Slade, and has returned to in his late career. These abstract images are dominated by linear forms and networks that pre-empt the loop structures in his films.

As part of a collaborative DACS grant to complete a comprehensive digital archive of all his paintings, drawings, prints, film, video and digital work, not to mention his prodigious body of critical and theoretical writing, Le Grice is currently collaborating with a research project at a Eurecom, a French graduate school and research centre in digital sciences, to develop a new DNA-based storage system. The work he is including in the Velarde exhibition offers some highly subjective ideas of what might emerge from such an evolutionary process.

The exhibition opens on September 20 and runs until October 19.