Georgia Gardner Gray’s practice comprises painting, drawing, sculpture, and theatre. Gray situates her figures in hierarchies public and private, digital and physical. With this backdrop, her subjects assert and lose autonomy. Gray destabilizes familiar objects, surroundings, and stereotypes to depict the present day as a necessary flux of multiple subjectivities. Characters form their personhood through an exchange of power, whether it is self-abnegation, control, or indulgence. Partaking in games of self-representation, they insinuate themselves into each other’s psyches.
Gray plays with the accoutrements of identification; how we decorate, signify, differentiate, and classify ourselves and the ubiquitous kitsch inherent in the process. Her reality extends far beyond a post-Warhol world where distinction between high and low has become irrelevant: critique culture is replaced by a desired reflection of self. Gray’s subjects exist in ironic relation to their environment; they are both a parody and the real thing. The viewer is left to probe what is being expressed as the operative word evolves from ‘kitsch’ to ‘cringe’. It is about coping: cloaking and revealing. Gray’s multiplicity of expressive modes and styles produces a space for the viewer to choose their relation with that imperative.
Biography
Georgia Gardner Gray was born in New York in 1988 and now lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Cooper Union School for the Advancement in Science and Art in 2011. Her works were shown for the first time in 2016 in a solo exhibition at the ACUD Gallery, Berlin. She has participated in group exhibitions such as Monday is a Day between Sunday and Tuesday, Tanya Leighton Galerie, Berlin (2017) and New Theater: Selected Plays, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015). In 2018 she was presented at Art Basel Statement with Gallery Croy Nielsen Vienna. Her recent institutional solo exhibitions include Precious Provincials at the Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany (2017) and Concorde at the UKS Oslo (2017). Gray was awarded the 2018 Lingen Art Prize by the Kunsthalle Lingen, Germany, who presented her solo exhibition Georgia Gardner Gray: Plays and Works, 2014-2019 later that year. Her most recent solo exhibition was Buddha Bless this Show, 2019 at Gallery Croy Nielsen Vienna.