Artist Biography
KIT GROVER was born in North Carolina and raised in Maryland. He studied at Carnegie-Mellon University and the Parsons School of Design. In the 1970s he became established in New York as a painter, represented by the Holly Solomon Gallery and as a designer by Art et Industrie. As an illustrator he was a regular contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and Esquire. In the same period he was commissioned by companies such as Henri Bendel, Fiorucci, Bergdorf Goodman, Moët et Chandon, The Hard Rock Café, Tower Records, and CBS Records among many others for 2D & 3D projects. He went on to design furniture, events, installations, and for stage, film, and television. He moved permanently to England in 1984 and since 1995 his work has predominantly involved retail interiors & product design. A commission to create and manufacture merchandise for an exhibition at Tate Modern in 2000 gave a new direction to Kit Grover’s work.
KIT GROVER LTD was established 2001 to create products almost exclusively in the cultural sector, designing and producing hundreds of products and editions for some of the world’s most prestigious galleries, museums and cultural institutions, many in collaboration with some of the most celebrated artists of our time.
By 2002 the company began designing retail interiors across the UK to extend the notion of institutional identity via commercial programmes for many of their clients. Projects include: six shops for Tate over the past fifteen years, the shop in the Egypt Gallery extension of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford for which he won a RIBA prize, design development for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s expanding campus which includes retail, education, art gallery, bar/cafe spaces, the concept and implementation of the visual arts programme and Pavilion at Glyndebourne, the Shake Bar for Benugo at the Science Museum, the new shop at the Baltic Centre of Contemporary Art which won the Museums & Heritage Award for the best shop 2019, and the new visitor centre for Christ Church, Oxford due to open autumn 2019.
Clients include Tate Galleries, RSC, National Theatre, Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Opera, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Selfridges, Other Criteria, Barbican Arts Centre, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Qatar Museums Authority,
Science Museum, Wallace Collection, MoCA Sydney, La Monnaie Paris, Bonnefantenmuseum
