Minor Attractions 2026: Michelle Grabner

50 Newman Street, W1T 3EB, London
October 13 – 17, 2026

Abattoir is very pleased to present an installation of paintings and sculptures by Michelle Grabner at Minor Attractions at the Newman Hotel, London. Grabner is well-known throughout the United States as a leading conceptual artist, curator/critic, and Crown Professor of Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She recently showed at Dorp Projects in London (2025).

The presentation is a conceptual installation of Grabner’s gingham paintings and jam jar lids, drawing upon two enduring motifs within the artist’s more than three-decade investigation of domesticity, repetition, pattern, and the aesthetic of the everyday. Presented alongside the gingham paintings, Grabner’s jam jar lids extend this inquiry from pattern to found object. Drawn from the material culture of the kitchen and the routines of domestic American life, the lids transform quotidian pattern into modernist motif. Together, the gingham paintings and jam jar lids create a conceptual installation that shifts between the domestic and the art historical.

This presentation follows a significant period of institutional recognition for Grabner. After two solo museum shows (Schneider Museum, Trout Museum), the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, Wisconsin) announced the acquisition of Grabner’s archive, encompassing more than 2,000 works spanning nearly the entirety of her career, alongside approximately 300 works from her personal collection and an extensive archive of teaching materials from her tenure at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The acquisition establishes JMKAC as the principal institutional home for Grabner’s work and teaching archives. Additional museum acquisitions will be announced later this year.

Michelle Grabner received her MA in Art History and BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. She is currently Senior Chair of the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a Core Critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking from 2011 to 2014. She has received much recognition in her field, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. A regular contributor to Artforum, her writing has also appeared in publications including Art in America, Frieze, Modern Painters, and Art-Agenda. Grabner co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer and served as the inaugural artistic director of FRONT International, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio and the vicinity that ran from July through September of 2018. She is also the founder and co-director of two non-profit art spaces in Wisconsin, The Suburban and The Poor Farm, with her husband, artist Brad Killam.

Grabner has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in the United States, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

She is represented in many museum and public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI; Knoxville Museum of Art, TN; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Grabner lives and works in Milwaukee and Chicago.

Abattoir is a space for contemporary art launched in 2020. The gallery presents a program of local, regional, and national artists designed to elicit thought-provoking conversation and discussion. The gallery works closely with collectors and consultants nationwide and has placed work in museums and other public collections. Abattoir participates in art fairs nationally and internationally.

Inquiries
info@abattoirgallery.com