Contributed by P. C. Smith / In a six-decade career, Grace Graupe-Pillard became known as a photo-realist painter of people – her 1986 breakout exhibition was “Urban Life Cutouts” – but in her current show “Burning Point,” also at Hal Bromm, she paints bold near-abstractions that suggest landscapes of destruction. Still using photo-realist methods and starting from news photos, sometimes combining multiple photos, she digitally filters and simplifies them in Photoshop to create complex high-contrast color shapes. She works out the compositions with a computer, at great length, then projects them onto canvas as traced shapes in much the same way she would portraits, but the shapes are larger, bolder, and decisively maintained, painted with smooth edges. Hard-edge work is usually geometric, but the delight of these shapes is their complex organic variety. The drama of her news sources is made explicit in intense color relationships, and high-keyed color keeps shapes separated even when they step chromatically from explosive light to darkness.
At their best, the paintings retain only slight suggestions of the scenes from which they were generated, but these clues are often violent. There is just enough rectilinear structure in the large-scale Gaza City to memorialize an earlier wave of destruction there (between Hamas and Fatah) rather than to detail it. In the small-scale Strikes, glowing rivers of white, green, and red stream through a black field, obscure until it becomes clear that the broken triangles could come from parked fighter jets capable of such eruptions. It is remarkable how much is represented with what is substantially abstraction. One wonders how deeply news photos of catastrophe have rooted themselves in our visual memory. In Camp X-Ray, an area of brightness is glimpsed from a darker area, where just a few diverging edges suggest the perspective of two figures in bunk beds. In this purple blackness, small irregular shapes glow bright red. For reasons that remain mysterious, one understands them to be bundles of belongings, glowing from the human needs of their owners.
Two more recent works, Lincoln Memorial and Protester and SCOTUS Quashing my V, experiment with politicized super-impositions. On the other hand, the very large Blast Wave is all jagged energies exploding upward from a thin strip of horizon. Its surprisingly beautiful pinks and tan swirl out from ominous smoky blackness, simply and powerfully. Graupe-Pillard has long been known as an affectionate painter of humanity, democratic and urban in outlook. She’s often humorous online, now banned from YouTube for posting topical satires using her nude body. She’s also a concerned political observer, and a grandchild of the Holocaust. This selection, possibly her best exhibition yet, demonstrates more impressively than ever the graphic power of her fears.
“Grace Graupe-Pillard: Burning Point,” Hal Bromm Gallery, 90 West Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY. Through November 21, 2026.
About the author: Paul Lake Smith is an artist who writes as P.C. Smith.
