Grace Metzler: Home Fries
Nunu Fine Art is pleased to announce Home Fries, its first solo exhibition of artist Grace Metzler in New York. Metzler (b. 1989) presents a recent body of paintings that broadens her exploration of community, intimacy, and the search for belonging. Splitting her time between Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Tilghman Island on Chesapeake Bay, Metzler draws from a life of transience to probe her personal associations with the word home: a concept that, for her, is as much about the interactions we have as the places we inhabit.
In Home Fries, Metzler expands her figurative repertoire from the individual to the collective. Groups of the artist’s exaggerated fictional characters converge in shared activities—playing, dancing, dining—forming vivid, dramatized tableaus of contemporary life that are both mundane and mysterious. Metzler depicts these groups of figures in thick brushstrokes and vibrant, oversaturated hues that mirror the turbulence of her past. The artist moved frequently in her youth, and her paintings recall a life of constant flux where she sought to find structure within the chaos.
Reflecting on the notion of returning home now, Metzler expresses she once felt like a spectator to her own experiences but is now able to consider the meaning of belonging with greater thoughtfulness, clarity, and familiarity. “In a painting, I can access a world that’s both familiar and strange—one that changes for everyone who looks at it. As a kid, I thought magic belonged to everyone else. Turns out, I just had to find my own way in through the back door.” Her paintings have since filled in that magic, transforming her imaginings of dreamlike, fantastical worlds into familiar and accessible places.
Works such as Ocean City Sushi, Tush Push, and COVID Tiktok Dance (all 2025) showcase Metzler's trademark dark humor and wit, sharply caricaturing the structures and rhythms of contemporary life as refracted through Metzler's unique perspective on the routines that shape collective and individual life. The scenes depicted in this group of works pull from Metzler’s personal experiences yet speak to nearly universal frames of reference—the dynamics of group sports, the relationships between mothers and children, the camaraderie of neighbors inhabiting a third space.
This dialogue between personal memory and collective experience extends into her current studio, where the rhythm of Metzler’s workflow echoes the time that passes between the characters and spaces in her paintings. As she mirrors the quiet routines and gestures of these figures, she observes that both her studio and her paintings become shared environments where groups of people, despite their different backgrounds and upbringings, form a shared relationship to the space they occupy and become united by the work they do. In making these connections, Metzler finds peace in the elusiveness of home, content to dwell within its mysteries and multiplicities.