Typoe Gran: Anatomy of a Practice
Boca Raton Museum of Art
March 25 – October 11, 2026
Typoe Gran’s art reads as playful on the surface—he doesn’t shy away from that. Look closer into the mind of the artist. Linger.
Gran begins each day in his studio with a couple of hours’ worth of free association drawing. What comes out are shapes and forms, reminiscent of the familiar, but not always exactly identifiable. Recurring objects include toys like children’s building blocks: the Jewish-Cuban artist has long held an interest in early child psychology, in how playing with blocks and shapes helps children develop abstract thinking. Flowers. The floral void inside the Louis Vuitton logo. Raven. Bones. Memento Mori. Gran accumulates a variety of these forms on single pages reminiscent of a da Vinci sketchbook, drawings of human figures, and would-be inventions.
For his first solo museum show, Anatomy of a Practice at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Gran has expanded from the page to fill a wall—a full 25-feet-across—with his idea-stage charcoal drawn objects and shapes. Curator Keffie Feldman positioned the mural, his largest drawing to date, to face the notebook page-sized artworks it evolved from.
The mural’s title, The World as I See It, takes its name from a quote by 20th-century French author Anaïs Nin: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” Indeed, Gran’s drawings build worlds as he sees them around him. His colorful Eden (2025), a bracing departure from the black-and-white charcoal drawings, appears as a playful, hopeful, unpopulated, geometric update of the first two panels from Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1490–1510).
Gran further extends the objects from his drawings into large sculptures, some several feet in height. These are displayed in the exhibition as well, positioned down the center of a gallery, creating a visual scavenger hunt, encouraging visitors to match the sculptural forms standing before them with shapes on the wall. Most artworks on view were created specifically for the exhibition and have not been seen before.
- Chad Scott
