Michelle Grabner is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and one of the curators for 2014 Whitney Biennial. End of last year, she had an exhibition at James Cohan Gallery.
This is what Michelle said about her art: "These works were based on particular materials such as washcloths, blankets and window screens. As in Scarry's quote, the work evolved away from the particular toward the universal. Although the process of employing found material as a template continued, the material--a simple cotton weave blanket--now provided only a roving grid pattern that did not reveal itself as a specific item. Local color evidenced in the previous bodies of work gave way to full spectrum bands of radiating pastel color, again making a shift toward Scarry's "distributional." This relationship to beauty is also underscored in Plato's requirement that we move from eros to caritas, from the interest in the beauty of one person toward the beauty of all. "Being good, bearing knowledge and acting fairly" are classical virtues I would like to reinvestigate via abstraction within the contemporary discourse of painting. I am most concerned with metaphorically conveying beauty as compassionate and good-hearted, that which is very distinct from the sublime."
Ken Johnson's, art critic at NY Times, reviewed Michelle Grabner exhibition and this is what he had to say about her art: "Nothing in all this is more interesting than the unexamined sociological background of the whole. If the show were a satire of the artist as a comfortably middle-class tenured professor and soccer mom, it would be funny and possibly illuminating, but it’s not."
In 2015, this is Michelle Grabner's rebuttal.
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