Gingham | Ensō

Gingham | Ensō places recent paintings by Wisconsin artist Michelle Grabner with wall-hanging sculptures by Oregon artist Anne Crumpacker. Starting in the 1990s, Grabner has explored fabrics in her home that favor abstraction and repetition, adapting them through painting, printmaking and sculpture. Over the years Grabner has returned to patterns such as crochet and gingham, creating a body of works that fluidly code-switch between domestic comfort and the formidable role of oil painting in art history. Anne Crumpacker’s Ensō works flow from long customs of using bamboo in Japanese art and crafts. Crumpacker uses different widths of crosscut bamboo to form sculptural representations of the ensō, a circle drawn in a single brushstroke and a foundation of Japanese ink painting. Both artists respectfully interpret their sources to create artworks that are minimal and elegant, but pleasingly imperfect in the tradition of wabi-sabi.