The paintings of Ken Grimes are strikingly honest, deceptively simple, and decidedly interstellar. Over several decades, Grimes has developed his singular style—using text, numbers, outer space iconography, and geometric shapes painted primarily in stark black and white—to prompt his audience to consider the possibilities and implications of alien contact with earth. Influenced by the proliferation of sci-fi media in his youth, Grimes has also continued to be moved by popular culture, a motif which intermingles with his interest in outer space in ways both earnest and irreverent. Showcasing art from Grimes’s long career, Evidence for Contact catalogs the endless variations on a theme produced by an absolutely unique painter during a lifetime devoted to the mysteries of extraterrestrial life.

Ken Grimes is an American artist from Cheshire, Connecticut. Having been interested in extraterrestrial life from a young age, he has dedicated his long career to exploring alien and galactic symbols and imagery. In 2013 he received a Wynn Newhouse Award, and his work is in permanent collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the American Folk Art Museum, among others.