Michelle Grabner | Untitled

Michelle Grabner is an artist, curator, writer, critic, and educator based in Chicago, Illinois. Her artmaking often articulates ordinary patterns from the domestic realm into a practice encompassing painting, sculpture, drawing and video. Her motifs evoke woven quilts, gingham tablecloths, red and white jam jar lids, and textured rag rugs that evidence the interior labor and craft of homemaking, using the visual language of grids and repetition reminiscent of the Minimalist movement of the 1960s.

 

In 2006 Grabner developed a series of monochromatic black tondos which employ textile patterns from rag rugs as source material with stitches rendered through dots of white flashe that emerge from a central spiral. “These works are firmly grounded in the now defunct tension between painting and weaving, crafts and the fine arts,” she has said of the series.  Evidence of the handmade is apparent, appearing as the imperfect, repetitive motion of needle stitches, yet drives a mesmerizing sense of illusion and vibration as its perceived symmetry collapses in on itself. 

 

Michelle Grabner (b. 1962, Oshkosh, WI) earned 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 2021 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship. In addition to her art practice, she is a regular contributor to Artforum and regularly writes for other major art publications. She co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art and is also the founder and co-director of two non-profit art spaces in Wisconsin, The Suburban and The Poor Farm.