On today's A Portfolio, we look into the roster at PPOW in NYC and see the works of up-and-coming and buzzworthy abstract painter, Grace Carney.
Referencing Japanese Shunga, Baroque and Renaissance painting, contemporary media, and her own body, Grace Carney (b. 1992) eschews easy categorization in her practice 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. 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.
Carney 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, NY, and Three Women: Grace Carney, Jeane Cohen, Abigail Dudley at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, New York, NY. 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 present Carney’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2024.