Jen Bekman Gallery is pleased to present What You’re Told, six paintings on canvas and eleven works on paper by Clare Grill. What You’re Told is Grill’s New York City solo debut.

The works created for What You’re Told encompass Grill’s participation in the Bronx Museum’s prestigious Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program. Of her work, Bronx Museum of the Arts curator Micaela Giovannotti wrote:

Clare Grill’s paintings dig up references from familiar histories, anecdotal imagery and make- believe. They are equally invested in exploring the formal tenets of painting and reinterpreting Grill’s childhood memories. Translucent layers of paint evoke the shabby surfaces of indoor furniture and the covers of antique books as much as they evoke the disconsolate tales of a wandering minstrel.

Grill has chosen young students, still-lifes, campfires, televisions and nuns as her subjects. In the seventeen works on view, she deftly combines abstractions and gestural moments to construct loose narratives of rights of passage, both secular and sacred. As her color palette wavers between washed-out and burnt-in, stories form and fall apart. In The Overachievers, girls with braids and buns hunch diligently over unseen tasks, their thoughts shimmering halos above their heads. In Fast Forward Through The Love Scenes, a TV screen reveals fleshy tones and blurs actual figures. Part tricks of memory and part magical acts, people and things appear and disappear. It quickly becomes known that all that can be recreated from fading memories are ghostly abstractions of the past.

Clare Grill was born in Chicago and now lives and works in Queens. She studied in St. Paul, MN and received her MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited in numerous group shows throughout the US, at venues including The Bronx Museum and Islip Art Museum. She has participated in the Drawing Center’s Viewing Program, Aljira’s Emerge program and Vermont Studio Center’s residency program. Her work was featured on the back cover of New American Paintings Vol. 68, and has been reviewed in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and New Jersey’s Star-Ledger. Grill has limited-edition prints available on 20×20