Grace Metzler: Almost Home
Nunu Fine Art is pleased to announce Almost Home, its first solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based artist Grace Metzler in Taipei. Metzler (b. 1989) will showcase paintings produced over the last three years. Splitting her time between Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Tilghman Island on Chesapeake Bay, Metzler developed this series while navigating a transient lifestyle, reflected in the works’ embrace of the prosaic and the peculiar.
Metzler’s paintings are snapshots of the lives of fictional people brought to life on canvas; her characters’ personalities, quirks, and mannerisms emerge through repeat appearances across works. Metzler shares, “They often help me out by telling me who they are and what their needs are. It excites me when the painting feels like a story being told to me by the process of painting and by the figures inside these worlds who are generously wanting us to know them.” While depicting satirized tableaus of day-to-day life, the artist’s immersive backgrounds are expressively illustrated through her use of color, joining soft neutrals with bold reds, yellows, and greens. Set against layered beachy backgrounds and natural landscapes, the characters act out mysterious scenes that skewer nostalgia for a bygone American ideal.
Metzler utilizes elements of dark humor and playfulness in her narratives, finding the pathos and amusement in titles and situations such as Bargain Bachelorette, Church Camp Skituations, and Everyone is a Little Overly Concerned About the Tsunami That’s Rolling In. Revelling in the inherent absurdity and drama of modern life, she explores the her characters’, and by extension her own, conflicted feelings about isolation and a desire for intimacy. This tension is expressed in the partially nude characters’ interactions, whether they are hugging, straddling, or caressing one another, suggesting intimacy but ultimately provoking viewers to assign their own meanings to her protagonists’ exuberant exchanges.
As each painting evolves, Meltzer reworks the surface by flipping a canvas upside down or removing or adding in characters, creating a stratigraphy of narrative history and giving each work a “past life” that mirrors the turmoil of contemporary ways of living. Her figures, often ultra-saturated and exaggerated, confront identity, longing, and interpersonal connection as the artist threads visual storytelling with painterly experimentation. Metzler’s compositions oscillate between the surreal and the intimate, inviting viewers into spaces that feel both dreamlike and familiar.