NYAB Event - Clare Grill "What You're Told"

Clare Grill "What You're Told"

This event has ended.
At Jen Bekman Gallery
Media: Painting

The works created for What You're Told encompass Grill's participation in the Bronx Museum's prestigious Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program. Of her work, Bronx Museum of the Arts curator Micaela Giovannotti wrote: "Clare Grill's paintings dig up references from familiar histories, anecdotal imagery and make-believe. They are equally invested in exploring the formal tenets of painting and reinterpreting Grill's childhood memories. Translucent layers of paint evoke the shabby surfaces of indoor furniture and the covers of antique books as much as they evoke the disconsolate tales of a wandering minstrel." Grill has chosen young students, still-lifes, campfires, televisions and nuns as her subjects. In the seventeen works on view, she deftly combines abstractions and gestural moments to construct loose narratives of rights of passage, both secular and sacred. As her color palette wavers between washed-out and burnt-in, stories form and fall apart. Part tricks of memory and part magical acts, people and things appear and disappear. It quickly becomes known that all that can be recreated from fading memories are ghostly abstractions of the past.

[Image: Clare Grill "The Overachievers" (2009) oil on linen 35 x 28 in.]