Michael Krebber
October 26th – December 15th, 2018
Ground Floor
"All languages being cousins beneath the skin, in other words?”
—Ian Watson, The Embedding
Greene Naftali is pleased to announce Michael Krebber’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery, and his first
since the artist relocated to New York City. The exhibition features new paintings based on iterations of
coded painterly gestures, executed in only two colors.
These gestures, which repeat and accrue across the exhibition, transform into an assembly of signifiers that
read like a novel.
Michael Krebber’s practice has consistently been characterized by strategies that offer a distinct commentary
on painting and art exhibitions, functioning by establishing and obliterating its own constitutive elements in
order to tell a joke that continues again and again. With this new body of work the artist moves towards a
blur of painterly and textual structures that establish a visual grammar through an abstract compositional
method. The interlacing goes back and forth, interweaving the blank ground of the canvas into the painting,
resurfacing fore- and background. The paintings in this exhibition play a dual role, as an essence in and of
themselves. Yet with their contingency upon a highly coded system, these works do not offer to complete or
resolve.