Georgia Gardner Gray at Kunstverein Hamburg

Artist: Georgia Gardner Gray

Exhibition title: Precious Provincials

Curated by: Anna Nowak

Venue: Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Date: April 22 – June 18, 2017

Photography: Joachim Schulz, Fred Dott and Corinna Koch, all images and courtesy of the artist, Croy Nielsen, Vienna and Kunstverein in Hamburg

In her first institutional solo show, painter Georgia Gardner Gray (*1988, New York, USA, lives and works in Berlin) presents new mid- and large-format paintings and drawings. Like French playwright Molière, the artist plays with codes of behavior through the mannered characters in her iridescent paintings. In this series, her images show outsiders like punks and groupies gleefully performing their rebellious lifestyles. She toys with gender attributions, vice, and ambition: be it unsatisfied intellectuals, hungry street musicians or lonely hung over couples. Gardner Gray grasps that the rebellious attitude has been camouflaged in a society that has made constant change and experimental lifestyles the going standard. To find the grain means coping with the ambivalences between self-determination, attitude, and personal freedom.

The works are staged within the exhibition space around the narrative of a theater play that Gardner Gray created specifically for the Kunstverein, adapted from the comedy The Affected Young Ladies, by Molière. She tells the story of a tyrannical and at once brilliant young girl, set in an ordinary family home whose fixed norms and plain conventions she rebels against with her precociousness and wit.

Georgia Gardner Gray studied at Cooper Union in New York. Her works were presented for the first time in a solo exhibition at the project space Acud Gallery, Berlin, in 2016. Gardner Gray has participated in the group shows Monday is a Day between Sunday and Tuesday, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin (2017), New Theater: Selected Plays, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015), The Pipe at the Gates of Dawn, Jan Kaps Gallery, Cologne (2014), among others.