Clare Grill

Grill's 2015 Touch’d Lustre was her fifth solo show in New York, and her first show at the gallery Zieher Smith & Horton. The show included eight large, abstract, oil-on-linen paintings. Further departing from her figurative beginnings, the paintings' imagery referred to modernist abstraction. The show attracted critical attention from publications including The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic. She is represented by Horton Gallery in New York City.

I look at images from the past as I work because they're heartbreaking and so haunting – what was never can be again. I mess with my imagery, layering and wearing it away until I've made a painting that makes you notice the paint as much as the pictures."

In her artist statement for her 2010 show, "What You're Told," at the Jen Bekman Gallery, Grill elaborated on her inspiration, source material and process: "I think about the beliefs and stories that were handed down to me and I reinterpret them in my paintings. Family folklore, backyard rituals, religious sacraments, ghost stories, church, school, obedience and trust in what you're told are among my subjects. The things we're taught can be learned a thousand different ways. I like for the familiar to seem a little unfamiliar and complicated, because it is.

Grill began her career in New York as a figurative painter. In 2008, the New York Times described Grill as a landscape and figurative painter in a profile of her and other artists' work in a group show at Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark.

Clare Grill (born 1979) is an artist from Western Springs, Illinois. Grill currently lives and works in Queens, New York.