“Multiples: Quotidian, Habitual, Stereotypical” is well worth the visit to spend time with Michelle Grabner’s trompe-l’oeil artifacts. In this show, her work revisits everyday objects that are infused with a kind of domestic nostalgia. She gives us porcelain or bronze reproductions of objects common to any home: things like aluminum-foil pans, a drip pan from an oven, lids from jelly jars, potholders—all “Untitled” and from 2024 or 2025. Carefully crafted, they are convincing in playing their parts as everyday things. It’s only on the closest inspection that the illusion falls apart.
These pieces evoke an idea of home, an idea of mother/grandmother, Saturday morning breakfast for the kids, and the perpetual labor of making that home. Inescapable in these replicas are their aesthetics, their abstract qualities, their forms, surfaces and patterns, which compare favorably to the celebrated works of Modernists like Barnett Newman, Frank Stella and David Smith. Grabner’s work sits at the edge of formalism, subverting and pushing back on that tradition by functioning more fully as a very satisfying refresh of Pop strategies seen in such works as Andy Warhol’s 1964 “Brillo Box (Soap Pads).”
Grabner has been working with these layered experiences for years; she plays games with signifiers, art history, history, memory and materiality. She engages in a continual dialogue that leans into re-examining what is overlooked and taken for granted, both in terms of objects and in the lives attached to them. Through the lure of visual pleasure, Grabner holds our attention and gives us time to consider these associations, sending us down a rabbit hole of internal dialogues.
In 1964, storied critic Harold Rosenberg published the book “The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience.” As an undergraduate, I had an assignment to write a paper on Rosenberg’s book. I had over a month to finish it. I forgot about it until the night before it was due. I stayed up, drinking coffee, speedreading and writing as I went along. All I remember about that paper and the book is pulling quotes and riffing off them. I remember absolutely nothing of the substance, so it was strange that after seeing Grabner’s show at Abattoir Gallery, I kept thinking that somehow her work is a follow-up on that book. He was writing in anticipation of a not-yet-fully-formed postmodern art world. Today, Grabner stands in its ashes. It is no longer the anxious object, but the anxious world.
In Rosenberg’s writing (I revisited his book), I get the idea that he’s grappling with the possibility that the grand narrative of art may have come to an end without any clear way forward. In our current time, art, and everything else, is grappling with the collapse of other narratives. We stand at the precipice of an unknowable future, and the relevance and value of art are under threat. How can I think about art when it feels like nothing is safe, when all is contingent? What can art do after all?
Grabner has been persistent in her themes. She has continually pushed the overlooked, the everyday, the mundane forward. In this work, and in many earlier works, she points back home to the signifiers of domestic labor and to craft. She points as well to a material, tactile world. Her world of objects are the products of manual labor, and while her attention to these themes has remained consistent, the context that frames them has shifted, revealing increasingly pointed commentaries.
In an article linked on Grabner’s website written by Polly Ullrich, “The Workmanship of Risk: The Re-Emergence of Handicraft in Postmodern Art” (New Art Examiner, April 1998) discusses the radical significance of craft and labor. Ullrich writes, among other things, “Handcrafts, with their relation to the body and the physical senses, counteract the drive toward technology and dematerialization in our culture.” She also writes, “Historically, sculptors and painters had been classified as artisans and craftspeople—not ‘artists’—and they therefore suffered from an association with manual labor, a prejudice going back to ancient Greece.” Grabner is only briefly mentioned in this article, but many of the ideas that Ullrich lays out in relation to art as craft (or craft as art) and its ability to engage the body, both through the labor of the maker and in the evocation of the senses, are clearly present in Grabner’s career as a whole. Grabner’s work follows through on the proposal of Ullrich’s thesis, enacting and supplementing these ideas, and thereby advocating for an art world in which the artist is understood as a laborer and the artwork as a material object that sits in opposition to the intangible virtual world of screens. Art can offer a physical, sensorial experience that serves as a balm for psyches made anxious by the relentless emotional demands of social media and the internet in general. Grabner’s work, in its insistence on tangibility, answers “what can art do?” by advocating for a reprieve from a digital simulacrum.
At her opening, Grabner stood in a workman’s coverall, every inch the laborer. Around her were the physical products of that labor. Hers is a world of things symbolically calling us home. The value in these works is in their formal beauty, the meanings they carry, and in their sheer materiality. Don’t be fooled by the appearance; see things for what they are.
Michelle Grabner’s “Multiples: Quotidian, Habitual, Stereotypical” is on view at Abattoir Gallery, 3619 Walton Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio, through November 8.
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