Trautes Heim | Collector Preview

Trautes Heim

Michelle Grabner

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 4th, from 6-9 PM.

Exhibition Dates: April 4th - May 9th

GGLA is proud to present Trautes Heim, a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Michelle Grabner. The show’s title translates from German to “home sweet home”, which connects to the domestic objects and references that Grabner recasts throughout the space, while also referencing a 1989 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York by German photographers Anna and Bernhard Blume. Throughout the exhibition by the Blume’s, the kitchen became an off-kilter, animated and entirely possessed space in which potatoes took on a life of their own flying through photographs, or careening towers of plates fell and broke in menacing fashion. Grabner’s exhibition similarly examines the domestic space, utilizing familiar objects within sculptural installations and wall-based works which continue upon the artists exploration of repetition, patterning and the ways in which systems of labor, power and hierarchy are both seen and unseen.

Within the main space of the gallery Grabner has organized a sprawling installation reminiscent of the domestic disorder in Anna and Bernhard Blume’s photographs. Realized in space, viewers are left to navigate the chaos of an installation consisting of cast bronze brooms and slip-cast porcelain cabbages and potatoes strewn throughout the gallery space. Yet focusing purely on a single object, it’s hard to not marvel at the incredible craft inherent in a ceramic cabbage reproduction, and all the embedded labor that it took to create such an incredible rendition of an organic form. Through collections of cabbages, potatoes and brooms, Grabner cites an interest in focusing the viewer onto themes of over-production, excess and industrial scale. The reproductions of brooms lead to ruminations on housework and janitorial work and the ways in which these positions overlap with class, gender, hierarchy, as does the focusing on fastidious ceramic facsimiles of such humble “staple” foods such as cabbages and potatoes.

Grabner’s wall works include bronze oil painted textiles, bronze folded tablecloths, woven potholders rendered in ceramic and wooden reliefs embedded with dispersed gingham jam jar lids and bronze-cast can tops. Though differing in methods and materiality, these works are all united in their exploration of repetition and pattern, order and disorder, and guiding systems of power. Within the bronze folded tablecloths and bronze-cast textiles adorned with oil paint, the beauty and fragility of heirloom craft techniques are burnt out and replaced with the imperviousness of metal, with the application of oil paint reintroducing a sense of softness and charm. Grabner’s ceramic potholders capitalize on the artist’s ongoing investigation of craft and material augmentation as well as the grid as an ordering principle, a modernist theme, and a means for containing and organizing power. The artist’s wooden reliefs studded with jar tops and can lids play on modernist abstraction, hierarchies in materials and class, while also capitalizing on the humor that threads throughout the exhibition.

Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Apron Patches), 2025, Graphite on erased pigment print on paper, 20 x 10 in. | $

Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Broom), 2025, Aluminum/Bronze with Oil, 39 x 3 x 51 in. | $

Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Wood Relief), 2021, Wood, bronze, Industrial printed steel, 11 x 12 in. | $

Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2026, Slip-cast Porcelain and Prismacolor, 10 x 9 in. | $

Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2026, Bronze, Oil, 18 x 11 in. | $

Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Broom), 2025, Aluminum/Bronze with Oil, 54 x 2 x 14 in. | $

Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Potatoes), 2025, Slip-Cast Porcelain / Cast Aluminum / Cast Bronze, 2 x 1 1/2 x 2 1/2 small, 2 x 1 1/2 x 4 1/4 medium, 3 x 2 1/2 x 5 large | $

Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Household Items), 2025, Slip-cast Porcelain, 12 x 6 x 15 in. | $

Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2023, Solid wood, Oil Paint, 8 x 3 x 13 in. | $

Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Household Items), 2025, Slip-cast Porcelain, 26 x 1 x 16 in. | $

Michelle Grabner, Untitled, 2024, Slip-cast Porcelain, 10 x 1 x 22 in. | $

Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Cabbages), 2025, Slip-Cast Porcelain / Cast Aluminum / Cast Bronze, 5 x 5 x 4 small, 6 x 4 x 6 medium, 7 x 5 x 6 large | $