2024 EXHIBITION ARCHIVE
Anne Marie Grgich
On View: Friday, Mar 1st - Sunday, Mar 24th
Opening Reception: Friday,
March 1st 6-8pm
There may be an objectively real world which exists independent of observation, some great oneness free of seemingly disconnected objects and qualities, where all the puzzle pieces of the universe fit seamlessly together. If such a state does exist, it is clearly not the commonplace experience of sentient beings. We are born and live and die in a dimension of countless multitudes of moving, swirling, clashing, harmonizing, interweaving, burning and freezing things. Some atoms attract. Others repel. They seek completion, balance. But all knowledge remains incomplete, and everything on this side of eternity continues to change, ceaselessly. The lack of completeness in any given thing affords that thing its unique qualities, defined against all the other things it is not. These are just the conditions of life, the bargain struck in order to be allowed the wonderful and terrifying experience of being alive.
The phenomenon of selective perception – summed up in a nutshell by Oscar Wilde with the aphorism that “nature imitates art,” is so latent to consciousness that it tends not to be interrogated. There is an assumed contract with reality, an assumption that any given thing is, for the moment at least, that thing. The work of Anne Marie Grgich creates a powerful spell, able to artfully undercut this comforting illusion through a cacophony of diaphanous tissues layered like sediments, an outpouring of re-purposed images. Bits of collage, scratches of drawing, pieces of fabric; cut-up, reversed, made anew. An old familiar cartoon character from some advertisement, now a ghost, perhaps living in some crackling fading transmission. Images like scarred microfilm, blurred microfiche, the feeling of collapse, and then the immense beauty realized in that same collapse. Like every paper doll in the world being sucked into a black hole, a purgatory for the detritus of human civilization. A world in which the images cease to be beholden to the species which created them and begin to live lives of their own. Faces, sometimes half-hidden, sometimes clear as a bell, made out of everything. Beckoning, repelling, at times inviting and at times demonic. Often both, possibly depending on the perception of the viewer who gazes into the fractured and re-knit kaleidoscopic whirl. A snowglobe world where shredded newspaper pictures rain down, telling endless stories which read differently to each viewer.
This is the first solo exhibit of the work of Anne Marie Grgich in New York City, and is comprised of over 80 works. This is only a tiny fraction of the artist’s body of work, with many of these pieces being completed especially for the exhibit.
Born in LA in 1961, Grgich is currently based in Tacoma WA and has spent most of her life in the Portland/Seattle area. Self-taught as an artist, her earliest forays into art-making began in childhood, with furtive explorations of painting on the inner covers of books in the family library.
While Grgich had artistic inclinations from childhood, it was a violent trauma that catapulted her into a life as a full-time artist. In 1981, at age 19, she was involved in a tragic car accident which took the life of her boyfriend, leaving her in a coma for two months. When she began to recover, she describes having to re-learn everything, over the course of the next decade. Surgeries and health complications have been part of her life since. In the context of her recovery, her work began to blossom, as she obsessively began refining her artistic approach, developing out of teenage journals which also included poetry. After becoming briefly entangled in what she describes as “a mind-controlling cult,” Grgich discovered the punk rock subculture, as a place where she could somewhat fit in as a person on an other-than-ordinary trajectory. Her forays into collage were borne of necessity, as poverty dictated that she would be short of traditional art supplies. Friends and neighbors would donate collage materials, and she began to perfect a new technique, with her collages becoming layered, far beyond what would be expected of the “traditional” collage approach. Grgich soon discovered that her work could be contextualized as Outsider Art, a genre encompassing iconoclastic artists unconnected with the “art world,” and she has enjoyed much acclaim in that artistic ecosystem.
She has been almost unbelievably prolific, obviously creating out of a profound and genuine need. Her work has garnered the attention and admiration of many galleries and collectors worldwide, including being featured on the cover of Raw Vision magazine, with accompanying article, in the Spring of 1998. She was again featured in this magazine in the Fall of 2019, and prominent Outsider Art scholar Colin Rhodes included her in a canonical overview of the genre. Her work is regularly featured at the Outsider Art Fair in NYC. Concurrent with this exhibit, her work can also be seen as part of the 2024 Fair, at the booth of Portrait Society Gallery of Milwaukee WI.
This exhibit also includes several collaborative pieces. Grgich worked on a series of collaborative purses and quilts with fellow self-taught artist Della Wells (b. 1951) during covid lockdown in 2020. The two artists have been friends for many years and their collaborations have continued to develop. There is an example of quilting done with her neighbor, Sandy Combes, and a large diptych collage overlayed atop a blueprint-machine copy of a marker drawing by Justin Duerr (b. 1976), yet another self-taught artist, who was introduced to Grgich at the Outsider Art Fair in 2023. In the spirit of collaboration Grgich has also undertaken curatorial duties, and work with musicians.
Present here is a vast array of work, as Grgich puts it “born of trash and tragedy.” But while the work may be born of trash and tragedy, it practically bleeds gemlike wonder, and uneasy joy, and inspiring determination. Books with pages so wrought they become heavy things, layers upon layers upon layers. All the pieces communicating with each other, as the tiny elements within them also speak to each other. Faces upon faces speaking of and to human frailty, bravery, and fear. Worlds within worlds within worlds, created from the ground up. Going from the inside to the out and back again.
A Poem By Anne Marie Grgich
My Dear Friend,
Betwix the antipodes of this mortal coil; to receive worship divine or be beneath contemptuous disdain, I feel that you regard me rather in the light of the latter, and isn’t it just like the world to make me incline towards the former. My prejudice dates back to the first day I laid eyes on you humiliating and subjugating the glandular ego talents prostrate before your own overweening artistic id.
Desire and Regret, if those 2 poles were football up-rites instead of opposite ends of the Earth we could score a few points in between, but the players have yet reach the field as it I have to visit the Seattle Center each day to hitch a ride on the roller coaster to catch the vicarious thrill of being around you, and sometimes at night I see speedy safelights crossing the stars in missions of purpose and the two hot dots of Venus and Jupiter, but I suppose am only star gazing linking us in constellation, feeling the gentlest tug of gravities pull.
I ask you to lunch on the flimsiest pretext but that transparent ploy was waft away like a diaphanous negligee at point of frank fact which you must of inked I was wafting in my imagination for the prospect of the capture of the proboscis of your torso in a bout of tumultuous tussling.
Can a man resist another feminine conquest? In this case its obvious he can, so the question becomes, are you a man so constrained by your own self serving satiety of circumspection that a proffered morsel of life rich pageantry is demurred as too succulent for a milquetoast mentality?
So let me ask you this, whats to stop us now in desiring something which we can both regret later on? I figured this would serve to speed things up kind of like a laxative so that we might find a niche and enjoy diversions and discussions greater in scope then just simply categorizing the rank and file of all my difficulties, legion though they may be.
Humbly yours, Anne
On view: Feb 2nd - Feb 25th
Fab Bohemians
Opening Reception Friday, Feb 9th 6-8pm
Featuring Artists
Brian Gormley
Doug Groupp
Kevin Wendall
Juan Carlos Pinto
Ed Higgins III
Consumer
Ron Burman
Ken Hiratsuka
Christopher Hart Chambers
Clayton Patterson
Van Der Plas gallery is pleased to present “Fab Bohemians”, its latest show exhibiting the works of ten different artists illustrating an array of outsider and street art concepts not typically observed. Much of the work on display represents a core group of original NYC street artists, some having been painting and creating since the 1980s. Having grown out of the East Village and Lower East Side, the power of much of the veteran art such as “Ms. Smiley” by Kevin Wedndall (aka FA-Q) and “Doo-Da Air Mail” by Ed Higgins III have developed into cult status and are highlighted and amplify the newer artists in the show, such as Doug Groupp’s “Giant Size”, exploring the edges of what an image can represent. The raw emotions and earned wisdom of these different artists, whose lives have risen and evolved along with their work and how their expressions have bloomed, present a wide palette and spectrum to be enjoyed by enthusiasts of every stripe. “Fab Bohemians” will be showing at Van Der Plas gallery Friday, February 2nd to Sunday, February 25th. There will be an opening reception the night of Friday, February 9th from 6 to 8pm.
