Grace Carney
P·P·O·W is pleased to present a two-person booth featuring paintings by Grace Carney and ceramic sculptures by Jessica Stoller. The presentation will bring together new works by both artists, juxtaposing their technical approaches and highlighting their shared interest in the physical and emotional experience of the gendered female body.
Grace Carney
Kiss, 2023
oil on canvas
66 7/8 x 51 1/8 ins.
169.9 x 129.9 cm
Referencing Japanese Shunga, Baroque and Renaissance painting, contemporary media, and her own body, Grace Carney’s practice eschews easy categorization with two self-contained bodies of work: her large-scale works on paper and her paintings. Featuring entangled limbs and contorting musculature, Carney’s drawings explore the physical experience of the human body, blurring the lines between anger and love; aggression and submission; movement and confinement. Similarly, her gestural oil paintings reflect an underlying interest in liminal spaces, embracing the ambiguity and messiness of the paint itself. Beginning each painting from a place of discomfort or constraint, often restricting her palette, Carney creates layered compositions that are both bodily and abstract; physical and emotional; specific and open-ended. Wrestling with distinct personal narratives and relationships, Carney imbues the manifold layers of her paintings with traces of her emotional experience, burying them within the murkiness of the paint.
Jessica Stoller
Untitled (pry), 2022
porcelain, glaze
9 1/2 x 3 1/2 x 3 ins.
24.1 x 8.9 x 7.6 cm
Working in the realm of figurative sculpture, Jessica Stoller mines the rich and complicated history of porcelain, harnessing its links to power, desire, and taste. Synthesizing the cultural, historical, and corporeal notions of a gendered female body, Stoller expands the feminist visual vernacular and makes space for subversion, defiance, and play. Deftly employing myriad techniques, Stoller’s complex works are hand-built, thrown, carved, molded, and ultimately fired multiple times to create richly colored surfaces. Defying conventional value judgments surrounding the ‘grotesque,’ Stoller harnesses its power to build a unique framework for hybridity, humor, and open-endedness. With her latest work, Stoller furthers her investigation into bodily autonomy and lost knowledge surrounding botanicals used to regulate female contraception and fertility. Drawing inspiration from 19th century "anatomical" wax sculptures, Stoller’s Untitled (pry) depicts a covered figure with ominous hovering hands prying open their pregnant stomach. Simultaneously covered and utterly exposed, works such as Untitled (pry) delicately reveal the horrors behind America’s ongoing repression of bodily autonomy, particularly surrounding reproduction.
Grace Carney (b.1992) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, in 2014, and received her MFA in Painting from the New York Studio School, New York, NY, in 2022. Carney was awarded the Jane C. Carrol Scholarship in 2020-2022 and the Hohenberg Travel Grant in 2022. Her work has been exhibited in I’m Not Your Mother at P·P·O·W, New York, and Three Women: Grace Carney, Jeane Cohen, Abigail Dudley at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, New York. Wrestle, her first solo exhibition in Europe, was on view at Beacon Gallery, Munich, Germany, in the winter of 2022. P·P·O·W will open her first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2024.
Jessica Stoller (b. 1981) lives and works in West New York, NJ. She received her BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Vielmetter, Los Angeles, CA; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Perrotin, Paris, France; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA; Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY; Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; Foundation Bernardaud, Limoges, France; and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY, among others. She has had solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Hionas Gallery, New York, NY; and The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, PA. A 2016 Pollock-Krasner grantee, 2013 Peter S. Reed grantee, and 2013 Louis C. Tiffany nominee, Stoller has also participated in residencies such as the Museum of Arts and Design’s Artist Studios Program, the Kohler Arts & Industry Program, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artist in the Marketplace Program, among others. Her work is featured in the recent Rizzoli publication, Clay Pop, a forty-artist survey of contemporary ceramics produced in conjunction with the 2022 exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch. In 2024, Stoller will present her third solo exhibition with P·P·O·W.
Grace Carney
Fever, 2023
oil on canvas
66 7/8 x 51 1/8 ins.
169.9 x 129.9 cm
Jessica Stoller
Untitled (Eve’s herbs), 2022
porcelain, glaze
5 x 9 x 8 ins.
12.7 x 22.9 x 20.3 cm
Grace Carney
Babygirl, 2023
oil on canvas
66 7/8 x 51 1/8 ins.
169.9 x 129.9 cm
Jessica Stoller
Untitled (scale), 2022
porcelain, glaze
12 x 12 x 8 ins.
30.5 x 30.5 x 20.3 cm
Grace Carney
Kiss, 2023
oil on canvas
66 7/8 x 51 1/8 ins.
169.9 x 129.9 cm
Jessica Stoller
Untitled (embrace), 2021
porcelain, glaze, china paint, lustre
11 x 9 x 14 ins.
27.9 x 22.9 x 35.6 cm
Some may be anticipating a shift toward abstraction in the contemporary art market at large, but figuration is still front and centre at the Independent art fair this year.
The first New York art fair week of 2023 is upon us.
Long sidelined by flat works which are easier to sell digitally, the 3D is resurgent
The much-anticipated 14th iteration of Independent New York, a cutting-edge art fair, is on view from May 11-14 at Spring Studios.
