Grace Carney’s paintings are unruly. Bodies appear and disappear beneath layers of color. Shapes fold and press against one another, scored with marks made by fingers, brushes, palette knives, and printing tools. Carney’s second solo exhibition at P·P·O·W–“To the Bone”—embraces this instability, presenting a new body of work that draws on everything from Renaissance portraiture and Baroque composition to the expressive gestures of modern abstraction. Heavy sculptural forms built up in thick impasto sit alongside bright paintings made with delicate washes. The exhibition doesn’t move from dark to light but instead holds both at once, perhaps in the understanding that happiness is not the opposite of suffering. “To the Bone” suggests that beauty does not depend on resolving every contradiction.
–Clara Scholl