Michelle Grabner: Gallery Exhibition at 291 Grand St

5 March - 3 April 2021

  • Michelle Grabner

  • Michelle Grabner is known for her broad perspective developed as teacher, writer and critic over the past 30 years. The site where it all comes together is the studio. Her artmaking is driven by a distinctive value in the productivity of work and takes place outside of dominant systems.

  • "Process is foundational to my entire work. Process can allude to not only repetition. There's contemplation. There’s also material manipulation. The process is never homogeneous or stagnant. There is learning that happens in process; there's boredom and tediousness that happens in process. How we live our lives gets distilled into the process of making work."

  • The works are subtle. Secure white grids become wonky and individualistic. They radiate, vibrate and dissimulate. Colors emerge and dissipate....

    The works are subtle. Secure white grids become wonky and individualistic. They radiate, vibrate and dissimulate. Colors emerge and dissipate. There is a defiance in how they evade easy reproduction, disregarding how images are disseminated in the digital age. Their quiet nature requires physical presence.

  • With a deep attention to abstract patterns and all the metaphors they conjure, Grabner pushes the limits of compositional structures to discover the tipping point between stability and precariousness; between continuance and wondrous difference.

     

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  • "I see the wood reliefs as sketches and conceptually based. They're fast and they represent a slightly different irregular aesthetic that I'm drawn to. But I'm still compelled by how the different forms and elements are nested into these beautiful specimens of wood."

     

  • 'I think about how one can create and produce form and then obligate the viewer to do the very hard...

    "I think about how one can create and produce form and then obligate the viewer to do the very hard work of interpreting those forms. So I use something that is very familiar to all of us to start this chain reaction."

  • "When I was invited to create an intervention in the men’s restroom in this new museum, the Art Preserve at the John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI, I had the opportunity to engage an entire environment to explore these ideas of disparate discourses through material and texture. This public project is slated to open in June 2021."

  • Installation Views

  • Michelle Grabner (b. 1962, Oshkosh, WI) received her MA in Art History and BFA in Painting and Drawing from the...

    Michelle Grabner (b. 1962, Oshkosh, WI) received her MA in Art History and BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. She is currently Senior Chair of the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a Core Critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking from 2011 to 2014. She returned to Yale in 2020 as a Visiting Artist. A regular contributor to Artforum, her writing has also appeared in publications including Art in America, Frieze, Modern Painters, and Art-Agenda. Grabner co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and served as the inaugural artistic director of FRONT International, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, OH and the vicinity that ran from July through September of 2018. She is also the founder and co-director of two non-profit art spaces in Wisconsin, The Suburban and The Poor Farm, with her husband, artist Brad Killam.  

     

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