Michelle Grabner

Michelle Grabner’s post-minimalist paintings and drawings return elements of craft to modes of artistic production. “These works are firmly grounded in the now defunct tension between painting and weaving, crafts and the fine arts,” she says. “I hope to reinvigorate some of the power struggles between burlap and linen, the loom and the stretcher, and concepts of labor and work, dichotomies most recently leveled by the free market’s objective to bring diversity to market.” Grabner often references the suburban—using embroidery, wallpaper, or gingham patterns as models—or utilizes arcane geometry, such as Archimedes spirals, wherein each point in a spiral is equidistant from the point that preceded it and the one that follows. Almost all of her work employs a two-tone palette, emphasizing the dynamics of positive and negative space and the texture of the surface, and fusing formalism with socio-political content.