Elmhurst Art Museum Presents IN THIS HOUSE Exhibit Preview

Elmhurst Art Museum IN THIS HOUSE
Untitled by Michelle Grabner 2016, Bronze, unique, 79 x 53 x 25 in Courtesy of the Artist and James Cohan, New York

The Elmhurst Art Museum (EAM) proudly announces In This House, a group exhibition featuring new sculpture and a site-specific curtain by acclaimed artist, writer, and curator Michelle Grabner. The show will also include collaborative works by Grabner and Brad Killam, and works by Paula Crown, Tony Tasset, and James Welling. The exhibition will be presented in Mies van der Rohe’s McCormick House Jan. 20-March 18, 2018.

“Regular exhibitions within the McCormick House grant new, ongoing interpretations of the home built by one of the 20thCentury’s greatest architects. We are excited to host a new group exhibition featuring Michelle Grabner, who has made a wide variety of works about the domestic throughout her career. Additionally, she and her husband Brad Killam used their own suburban home as a platform for avant-garde art,” said John McKinnon, Executive Director.

The show’s title stems from an advertisement for prefabricated housing designed by Mies, for which the McCormick House was a prototype. The 1955 brochure states “In this house, architecture and technology have combined to contribute a new dimension.” The works in the exhibition expand on this intersection and celebrate the formal languages that inhabit domestic structures. Materiality, repetition, color and spatial order will be featured and minimally distributed throughout the volumes of the McCormick House living space.

A public artist talk with Grabner will be held on opening day, Jan. 20 at 1:30 p.m.

Michelle Grabner will contribute a series of cast iron forms designed by the Kohler Company. These reductive plumbing fixtures are heavily coated in black oil pigment stick to emphasize their abstract properties over their functional attributes. Grabner will also contribute a selection of cast brass and iron textiles and household articles that function through repetition.

Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam will create new mobiles for the museum’s main space. The large piece will feature a painted canvas with garbage can lids attached to it. Together, they will also exhibit a video from the 1990s where Grabner and Killam passed their son Oliver back and forth to each other.

Paula Crown’s series of cast red plastic Solo Cups show how color and design of disposable materials reveal social conditions.

Tony Tasset’s Domestic Abstractions reinforce tactility and familiar materiality as a means to critique gestural abstraction. These finely crafted pieces capture abstract forms with animal hides and fur often used as interior design elements.

James Welling’s photographs of the Farnsworth House in Plano, IL study how glass and light breakdown the spatial volumes of architecture and introduce the ontologically different order: The physics of the color spectrum.

Elmhurst Art Museum IN THIS HOUSE
Untitled by Michelle Grabner, 2016, Oil on burlap over panel, 24 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist and James Cohan, New York.

About Michelle Grabner

Michelle Grabner is the Co-Artistic Director of FRONT International, the Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. In 2016, she curated the Portland Biennial and in 2014, co-curated the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, INOVA, the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Ulrich Museum, and University Galleries at Illinois State University. She has been included in group exhibitions at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Tate St. Ives (UK) and Kunsthalle Bern (Switzerland). Herwork is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in DC, the Walker ArtCenter, Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, MUDAM (Luxemburg), the Milwaukee Art Museum, Madison’sMuseum of Contemporary Art, Daimler Contemporary (Berlin) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).

Grabner holds an MA in Art History and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. She joined the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996, and became Chair of its prestigious Painting and Drawing department in the fall of 2009. She is also a senior critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking. Her writing has been published in ArtforumModern PaintersFrieze and Art Press, among others.

Tickets

Adults - $9

Seniors (65+) - $8

Students & Ages 18 and Under - Free

Photos

All Photos Courtesy of the Artist and James Cohan, New York

When

Exhibit opens January 20-March 18, 2018

The Public Talk - January 20, 2018 at 1:30pm

Where

Elmhurst Art Museum

150 Cottage Hill Avenue

Elmhurst IL 60126

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