Born in Plymouth in May 1940, Malcolm Le Grice started as a painter but in the mid 1960’s went on to make experimental film and computer works. Since then, 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.
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.
As one of the first members of the Computer Arts Society in the late-1960s, Le Grice taught himself to programme large mainframe computers, which led to him creating ‘Your Lips’ 1970), the first British computer generated work of visually abstract cinema. His enquiries have continued through the realms of video, digital and computer art.
Le Grice has had a long involvement in research and Academic life. He established a Film and Video department at St Martins School of Art in London in the 1960's and was the Dean of Art, Design and Media at the University of Westminster from 1984 to 1996 then Head of Research at Central St Martins of the University of the Arts London until 2001 where he continues to be a Professor Emeritus. He has served on National Education committees in the UK including the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA), the Research Panel of the Higher Education Funding Council (HEFC) and the Arts and Humanities Funding Council (AHRC). He has also served on the Production Board of the British Film Institute (BFI) and was Chairman of the Film and Video Panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB). He was a founder of the Film Workshop of the London Film Makers Co-operative and until 2006, director of the British Artist's Film and Video Study Collection, a major research archive at the University of the Arts London.
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.