Referencing Baroque and Renaissance painting, literature, daily life, and her own body, Grace Carney (b. 1992) eschews easy categorization in paintings which hover between abstraction and the possibility of figurative forms. Blurring the lines between anger and love; aggression and submission; movement and confinement, Carney’s gestural oil paintings reflect an underlying interest in liminal spaces, embracing the ambiguity and messiness of the paint itself. Wrestling with distinct personal narratives and relationships, Carney imbues the manifold layers of her densely worked surfaces with traces of her emotional experience, burying them within the murkiness of the paint. Born in Minnesota, Carney received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, in 2014, and MFA in Painting from the New York Studio School, New York, NY, in 2022. Carney was awarded the Jane C. Carrol Scholarship in 2020-2022 and the Hohenberg Travel Grant in 2022. Her work has been exhibited in I’m Not Your Mother at P·P·O·W, New York, NY, and Three Women: Grace Carney, Jeane Cohen, Abigail Dudley at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, New York, NY. Wrestle, her first solo exhibition in Europe, was on view at Beacon Gallery, Munich, Germany, in the winter of 2022. Carney has recently been featured in Galerie Magazine and W Magazine, among others. Carney presented girlgirlgirl, her first solo exhibition with P·P·O·W in January 2024.