Exhibitions

In collaboration with the Galería Marta Cervera, we present the work of Clare Grill in our space. The strong interest generated by her recent exhibition, CUTWORK, called for an extension of her presence in Madrid, expanding the dialogue with her intimate and evocative pictorial language.

Clare Grill’s work is characterized by a vast vocabulary of forms, colors, and compositional decisions, inspired by antique embroidery as well as 18th- and 19th-century birth, baptismal, and marriage certificates.

In this exhibition, viewers encounter works on paper from the Samplers series: oil paintings inspired by embroidery exercises that serve as a source of forms, marks, colors, and compositions, also informing her paintings on linen. As the artist herself writes: “Samplers, made by young girls as part of their schooling, depict the alphabet, numbers, decorative motifs, and often a prayer or verse about death and ascension to heaven. They are complex objects, filled with reverence for beauty, obedience, and skill, but also hand cramps, pinpricks, boredom, and perhaps anger. They are made by small hands, but they are small and strong things. I choose them for my works. I wish to preserve them, parts of them—their tactility, their fractures, their sweetness and melancholy—and give them some kind of stage. To dress them and bring them into the light.”

Also on view are new small-scale works from the Signets series, referencing seals historically used to mark documents and possessions, often impressed in wax. Signets represent a name, a person, and the marking of occasions. About them, Grill writes: “I received a signet ring when I made my first communion, GAG. It fit on my ring finger, but eventually only on my pinky. The letters have worn away—I wear it all the time. Inside it reads May 9, 1987. I remember falling asleep on the grass that day in my white dress, which had belonged to my grandmother. When my mother took it off that night, I was covered in chickenpox. The dress was full of bows, the oldest bows I had ever seen. My cousin still has it. I think it has fewer bows now.”

The exhibition, titled CUTWORK, refers to an old embroidery technique in which small sections are removed and the resulting voids are carefully embellished with thread. A precursor to lace, cutwork was historically used by nuns to decorate clerical garments, household linens, and textiles. “I like the word CUTWORK,” Grill writes, “I like how it sounds when spoken, I like how it looks.” The marks that traverse Grill’s works—her Samplers and paintings—echo this process: elements are extracted, altered, and reconfigured with care and attention. They suggest a language of transformation—borrowed, mended, and reused.

Clare Grill (b. 1979, Chicago, IL) received her MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2005 and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Wich Language and Oyster at M+B, Los Angeles; At the Soft Stages and There's The Air at Derek Eller Gallery, New York; and Touch’d Lustre at Zieher Smith & Horton, New York.

Recent group exhibitions include Of Flesh and Air at Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid; The Feminine in Abstract Painting at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York; Deep! Down! Inside! at Hales Gallery, New York; and New Skin, curated by Jason Stopa, at Monica King Gallery, New York. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as Artforum, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe.

Grill lives and works in Queens, New York.