Cottage Work: Michelle Grabner
Milwaukee, WI -- On January 21st, The Green Gallery will feature Michelle Grabner’s new body of paintings in the exhibition, “Cottage Work,” a title that implies an association with the informal and practical traditions of craft, particularly weaving.
Conceding to the traditional linen support of painting her on-going interest in the minimalist grid, found composition, and domestically orientated textiles, Grabner explicitly imbues painting and its Twentieth Century abstract conceits with the literal artifacts of weaving and the representation of warp-and-weft material construction in the new work. Evoking the long-debated critical relationship between the fine arts and craft this work more profoundly underscores the poetics of all elemental visual language construction.
The new series of paintings on panel embed woven patterns that Grabner creates by pulling out the warp and weft threads of burlap, linen, and needlepoint canvases. Encasing them in the traditional painting medium of gesso, these paintings feature a monochromatic vocabulary of grid patterns and material reliefs. A series of recent gingham pattern paintings will also be shown. These paintings mark Grabner’s return to the domestic and representational tenants shaping her “backdrop” paintings from the 90s. Critic Barry Schwabsky writes that, “Her paintings refer to the traditionally feminine realm of the domestic by way of the metaphorically loaded imagery of fabrics and textiles--not only blankets and curtains but rugs, clothing, and so on.”
Grabner’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Contemporary, New Art Examiner, Art Issues. In February 2010 she was the subject of a 10-page interview by critic Saul Ostrow for Art in America. She is currently included in “The Indiscipline of Painting: International Abstraction from the 1960s to Now,” an exhibition organized by the Tate St. Ives and traveling to the Warwick Gallery in 2012. She is also currently included in “on-going minimalism” at Rocket, London. Her work is included in the permanent collections at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MUDAM - Musée d’Art Moderne Luxemburg; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
(Bootlegged, Re-ordered, Combined, Sometimes More, Sometimes Less)
Milwaukee, WI -- Los Angeles-based artist Drew Heitzler presents a three-channel video projection entitled Spiral Jetty / Crystal Voyager / Region Centrale (Bootlegged, Re-ordered, Combined, Sometimes More, Sometimes Less), 2011.
Heitzler's films and film related projects have been exhibited widely internationally in venues such as the Sculpture Center, New York; PS 1, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Project, New York; Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland; Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen, Switzerland; Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Bruxelles, Belgium; LAX Art, Los Angeles; Magasin Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France; and Artists Space, New York. Heitzler was included in the 2010 California Biennial and his collaborative work with artist Amy Granat was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Heitzler studied at Fordham University, New York, Slade School, London, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, and he received his M.A from Hunter College. Heitzler was born in Charleston, South Carolina and lives and works in Los Angeles.