Presenting
Michelle Grabner at Independent New York
Spring Studios, Booth 616
May 8th – May 11th 2025
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.
Michelle Grabner, a conceptual artist as well as a teacher and critic, has mined the vocabularies of domestic patterns and fabrics in much of her painting, printmaking and sculpture over the last 35 years, with a concentration on ginghams, burlaps, and crocheted items that are foundational to her art work.
She received 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. Grabner is currently Senior Chair of the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a Core Critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking from 2011 to 2014. In 2021, Grabner was awarded the Fine Arts Guggenheim Fellowship. She returned to Yale in 2020 as a Visiting Artist. A regular contributor to Artforum, her writing has also appeared in publications including Art in America, Frieze, Modern Painters, and Art-Agenda. Grabner co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer and served as the inaugural artistic director of FRONT International, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, OH and the vicinity that ran from July through September of 2018. She is also the founder and co-director of two non-profit art spaces in Wisconsin, The Suburban and The Poor Farm, with her husband, artist Brad Killam.
Grabner has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University; INOVA, The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Ulrich Museum, Wichita; and University Galleries, Illinois State University. She has been included in major group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Akron Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate St. Ives, UK; and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. Her work is included in the permanent collection of museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MO; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; MUDAM, Luxemburg; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI; Knoxville Museum of Art, TN; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Grabner lives and works in Milwaukee.
Abattoir is a space for contemporary art in the historic Hildebrandt Building, a former meat processing plant in the resurgent Clark-Fulton neighborhood of Cleveland, located between the West 25th Street corridor and Ohio City. The gallery was launched in 2020 by Lisa Kurzner and Rose Burlingham. It presents a program of local, regional, and national artists, designed to elicit thought-provoking conversation and discussion.
Abattoir showcases exhibitions across all media and works closely with collectors and consultants nationwide to build and enhance collections, the gallery has placed work in numerous museum and prestigious corporate collections including the Cleveland Clinic Art Program, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Akron Art Museum, the Carnegie Museum, and the Orange County Museum of Art, California. In addition to presenting a vibrant program of shows in Cleveland, Abattoir presents at premier art fairs in New York, Miami, Chicago and Mexico City.
Since 2020, Abattoir has introduced major artists with Cleveland connections to audiences in Northeast Ohio, fostering education and engagement with contemporary art in the region.
Image
Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Janitorial Cart), 2024-2025. Courtesy of Abattoir.
Press Inquires
Kristin Sancken, kristin@sanckenprojects.com, 706.830.5850
