2025 New Editions: Michelle Grabner

Michelle Grabner’s new editions with Tandem Press continue her decades-long exploration of universal forms found in everyday objects. The three prints depict rainbow-colored paperweavings, the ones you may have made as a child in kindergarten. The colors move across the page in a rhythm of the under-over tabby structure. However, the prints themselves are flat, as pencil-thin lines appear to create the illusion of the woven page. 

The 19th-century German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel introduced paperweaving to children as a means to teach design principles, employing abstraction as a pathway to understanding creativity and natural harmony. For Fröbel, the foundations of learning encompassed all forms—from mathematics and symmetrical patterns to tangible objects—ultimately aiming toward a unified, holistic way of seeing the world. His philosophy of early education and abstraction would go on to influence modernist artists such as Kandinsky and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The iterative repetition of the woven patterns, combined with the brilliant spectrum of colors, evokes a sense of recognition: a return to the fundamentals of learning.

Grabner’s choice of bold, saturated colors for her abstract prints references Color-Aid Papers—screenprinted sheets available in a wide spectrum of hues and tints—commonly used in fundamental design courses to teach color theory. The iterative repetition of the woven patterns, combined with the brilliant spectrum of colors, evokes a sense of recognition: a return to the fundamentals of learning. It’s a visual language that aligns knowledge with play—core principles in both artmaking and how we come to better understand the world.

For Grabner, shared universal forms take precedence over individual self-expression. “When one can move value around, it is really important,” she explains. While painting’s value is often placed in the “hand of the artist,” these prints—rooted in processes of repetition and serial production—reject personal expression in favor of regularity and structure. In the precision of pattern and color, Grabner reasserts the value of form—not as limitation, but as a foundation for discovery.

In the precision of pattern and color, Grabner reasserts the value of form—not as limitation, but as a foundation for discovery.

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Michelle Grabner is a Wisconsin-based artist, writer, and curator. She co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial and was the Artistic Director for the inaugural 2018 FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. Her practice spans a variety of media, including drawing, painting, and sculpture, and finds a creative center in operating across platforms and towards community. Her work has been the subject of several national museum surveys. She is presently represented by James Cohan, New York, and Green Gallery, Milwaukee, among others. Grabner is the Crown Family Professor of Art and the Senior Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught since 1996. She has also held teaching appointments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts—Bard College, Yale University School of Art, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

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Click here to view all available works by Michelle Grabner