Jude Griebel: Nature Bends for You

Massey Klein Gallery is pleased to present Nature Bends for You, a solo exhibition of new sculptures and works on paper by Jude Griebel. The exhibition will be on view from April 25th through June 13th, with an opening reception on Saturday, April 25th, from 6-8pm. About Jude Griebel’s work is known for its mischievous and morally pointed whimsy. In his new work for the Gallery, human forms are again merged with the natural world in amusing and troubling ways. But Nature Bends for You ups the visual and emotional ante. Fresh from a residency at Kohler Pottery Studios in Wisconsin, the artist’s new Vitreous China pieces have a deceptively beautiful lustre. Shining green hands, rather than a fibrous husk, enclose a cob of corn. Oranges engage in sacrificial juicing, flowers amputate themselves, and a fried egg teeters on legs as existentially spindly as Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man. While it goes without saying that the natural world has been devastated by human greed and consumption, and while much ink has been spilled on the psychic aftereffects–eco-anxiety, loss of agency, a pervasive atmosphere of doom–Griebel’s work operates in a further emotional sphere. His work can be read as an expression of deep nostalgia. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” wrote Shakespeare. “And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Griebel’s work speaks to a universal longing for such an impossibly alive and integrated world. If there is any hope in Griebel’s art, it lies in its sense of childhood imagination. Children play with the food on their plates and so does Griebel in his ceramic work Broken Circle. A sprig of parsley for a nose, lemons for cheeks, two ramekins of cocktail sauce for the all-seeing, blood-red eyes. Broken Circle appears guileless and innocent. But the face is also a record of trauma. As Griebel’s characters feel plucked from the pages of fairytales, they’re also enveloped in visceral and emotional horror. Children internalize the plight of the runaway gingerbread man, fleeing for his life. They’ll also admonish each other for ripping the papery “skin” from Birch trees. Griebel’s work, then, is about what many children innately know. Everything is alive. Animals, trees–obviously. But also dishes running away with spoons. When we mature into rational adults, we lose our magical thinking. The kind of empathy we lack, and the instrumentalization of all beings, stems from the enlightened stripping away of sentience from creation. When anthropomorphism is used tactically, as it was in KFC’s “chicky” mascot of the late 1990’s, it becomes, according to Griebel’s research, a “troubling projection of our entanglement with the natural world.” It cute-i-fies the slaughterhouse, the processing plant. But in his work, Griebel uses anthropomorphism as a wake-up call, a siren from the remote depths of childhood. Through the realization of Griebel’s’ imaginary friends, we feel a touch of magical affinity again. Read more Toggle Drawing Sculpture