Michelle Grabner

Michelle Grabner is the Crown Professor of Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. Curator, critic and teacher, Grabner also runs experimental non-profit galleries the Suburban and the Poor Farm with her husband, artist Brad Killim. In 2014, she was a curator of the Whitney Biennial, and in 2018 the Artistic Director for the first FRONT International triennial in Cleveland. In 2022 she was co-curator of Sculpture Milwaukee. A mid-career survey, I Work From Home, appeared at moCa Cleveland in 2014. She has exhibited extensively worldwide and is represented by James Cohan Gallery, New York.

In her paintings, drawings, and works on paper, Michelle Grabner merges the aesthetic of the minimalist grid with that of the domestic and the handcrafted. Creating patterns inspired by household items as well as woven textiles such as gingham and denim. Grabner’s work challenges the supposed opposition between abstraction and representation, and between craft and fine art. 

Selected recent solo exhibitions include: A Minor Survey at MICKEY, Chicago, Green Gallery, Milwaukee, Alice Austen House, Staten Island, New York, EFREMDIS, Berlin, the Milwaukee Art Museum and others. She first showed at Abattoir in 2021; this is her second exhibition with the gallery.