Abattoir is thrilled to present a solo presentation of the newest body of work by artist Michelle Grabner at Independent, booth 616. The fair opens with a preview on Thursday, May 8th, and continues through Sunday, May 11th. Grabner’s latest works mark a bold shift into large-scale sculpture and a new direction in her practice.

Grabner’s longstanding artistic approach centers on the aesthetic patterns and materiality of everyday domestic and functional objects. Often rooted in the intellectual foundations of fine art as well as the handmade tradition of craft, these motifs are mass-reproduced through industrial processes, becoming visually ubiquitous and culturally flattened, stripped of significance. By refiguring and recreating common everyday objects—often linked to domestic labor—using high-value materials such as cast metal and weaving, she highlights their inherent complexities and visual nuances, as well as post-industrial society’s tendency to prioritize immediacy over originality. The artist’s current work, to be presented at Independent, extends her interest in the replication of common things from the personal domestic sphere of home and kitchen to the public yet overlooked world of janitorial labor in the United States. Featuring cast sculptures of sinks, mops, and buckets, these works examine the aesthetics of utility in certain forms of invisible labor, as well as the relationship between art and everyday objects, modes of production, and the interplay between industrial and bespoke processes. As the artist states, “The transformation of common objects and everyday materials challenges the ideas of art and value, questions consumerism, and further foregrounds the discourses between art and everyday life. Depicting intimate, everyday objects brings into discussion the temporalities of labor, domesticity, and repetition. Aligning with broader traditions in modernism this work continues to complicate the divisions between the populistic and the idiosyncratic, high and low, the original and the copy. Contemporary artists engaging with the mundane and ideas of the unoriginal also challenge our contemporaneous attention economies and culture's predilection for immediacy.” In addition to her presentation at Independent, Grabner also has two concurrent museum exhibitions: a major retrospective at the Schneider Museum of Art, opening on April 17, 2025, which will include a catalogue and an essay by art historian Sue Taylor, and a solo exhibition at the Haggerty Museum, currently on view through May 24.