Michelle Grabner

  • Grabner artmaking—which encompasses a variety of mediums including drawing, painting, video and sculpture—is driven by a distinctive value in the productivity of work and takes place outside of dominant systems. Grabner instead finds a creative center in operating across platforms and towards community. Grabner uncovers new dynamic relationships through her visionary practice of repetition. With a deep attention to abstract patterns and all the metaphors they conjure, Grabner pushes the limits of compositional structures to discover the tipping point between stability and precariousness; between continuance and wondrous difference.
  • Exhibitions
  • Michelle Grabner is a Wisconsin-based artist, writer, and curator. She co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial and was the Artistic Director for the inaugural 2018 FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. Her practice spans a variety of media including drawing, painting, and sculpture, and finds a creative center in operating across platforms and towards community. Her work has been the subject of several national museum surveys. She is presently represented by James Cohan, New York and Green Gallery, Milwaukee, among others.
     
    Grabner is the Crown Family Professor of Art and the Senior Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has also held teaching appointments at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cranbrook Academy of Art; Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts—Bard College; Yale University School of Art; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine.
  • Works