ANTONIETTA GRASSI IS THE RECIPIENT OF THE 2024 GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIP
AWARDED BY THE JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL FOUNDATION.
Antonietta Grassi’s work speaks to multiple histories, textiles, the pioneering role of women in technology, labour, and the lineage of abstraction. She is the recipient of multiple awards and grants including the Guggenheim Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Québec Council for the Arts.
Over her thirty-year career, Grassi’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in Canada, the US, Europe, and the Middle East including the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Katonah Museum of Art in New York, and the Canadian Pavilion at Expo Dubai. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at the Musée des Beaux Arts de Sherbrooke, Project:ARTspace in New York and Cambridge Galleries in Ontario, Canada. A monograph of her work published by SAGAMIE Publications will be out in June 2024.
Her work is in public collections including the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Museée d’art contemporain de Baie -Saint-Paul, the Canadian Embassies in Dubai and Tunisia, the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, Archives Ontario, the Boston Public Library and many corporate and private collections. Grassi holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from l’Université du Québec à Montréal.
STATEMENT
Antonietta Grassi has been committed to the practice of abstract painting for most of her career. Her paintings, which often resemble weavings or textiles, are composed of multi-layered painted surfaces that are intuitively derived at. Forms that resemble machine parts are intersected by fine, thread-like lines—creating works where textile, architecture, analog technology and the history of abstract painting collide.
The machine and its history are common themes in Grassi’s paintings. But while acknowledging the sad fate of discarded parts, these machines are anything but disheartening. They are gloriously bright, autonomous beings that seem to be very much alive. It is not simply their form, but also the inner workings of their operating systems that speak to Grassi. Inspiration comes from women mathematicians and computer scientists like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper. The Jacquard loom, one of the earliest computer systems, also makes its way into Grassi’s practice. Not only do many of her machines resemble its form, but it also provides a link to her roots. Grassi’s mother and aunts worked in the garment industry, and she herself worked as a textile designer. The recurrent threads in her paintings seem to hold these influences and memories together at the seams.
Antonietta Grassi’s use of colour and the grid speak to the works of women artists from the canon of twentieth century modernist abstraction-another coding system in its own right: Helen Frankenthaler and Agnes Martin can be glimpsed underneath the multicoloured horizontal lines. Like Eva Hesse, she adds her own personal touch to a seemingly impersonal subject by imbuing the machine with life and feeling. Her approach to painting is both intuitive and intentional, charged with memory, but also mathematically and technically precise. And there is always an expression of hope and connection, despite the age in which we happen to find ourselves.
Artist website: antoniettagrassi.com
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