Michelle Grabner

Michelle Grabner paints repetition until it becomes critical — grid, weave, gingham, the patterns usually relegated to the background brought forward and held under pressure. The work is abstract but never neutral; every arrangement carries political weight, every mark a claim about who gets to occupy compositional space.

The studio practice spans painting, sculpture, drawing, and video, but the throughline is process: slow, serial, attentive to the tipping point between order and collapse. She's equally fluent in institutional spaces — co-curating the 2014 Whitney Biennial, directing the first FRONT International triennial in Cleveland, teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

She founded The Suburban and The Poor Farm, two artist-run spaces in Wisconsin, with her husband Brad Killam. The work is in collections from the Art Institute of Chicago to the V&A. She lives and works in Milwaukee.