Artists writing about Artists: Tim Maul on Alina Grabovsky 
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In the 1950’s American Abstract Expression played a covert role in an attempt to liberate creative minds behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ during the Cold War. This ‘Trojan horse’ took the form of several major traveling exhibitions of paintings organized in the belief that these radical artworks would transform into examples of ‘free expression’ hastening the overthrow of oppressive Communist regimes. In the following century painters like Alina Grabovsky (born Kyiv 1987) are still choosing to address the canvas and improvise an original visual language inviting multiple readings and translations.

Grabovsky’s stay in New York introduced the polyvocal vibrancy of New York City’s overlapping ethnic and religious communities to her developing art. I recognized the urban mania of the boroughs in these oil paintings, after all, it was NYC that taught Mondrian to boogie-woogie. Every abstract painting is in conversation with another abstract painting both past and present allowing for art history time-travel. 

Sensuality/pleasure for Grabovsky are not a bad word(s). Her generation navigates a safe distance from the censorious puritanism of ‘critical theory’ (unless they wish to embrace it) allowing the color pink to stand in for flesh or to integrate the occasional Francis Bacon quotation via the splash or in meaty amusement park contortions rendered in what appears to be wedding cake frosting across provocative bulges and shattered picture planes. Grabovsky’s ecclesiastic purples and reds also look Baconian to me and her surfaces so sumptuous.

However, in perusing some recent ‘theory’ I came across a review of Benjamin Buchloh’s (who once puzzled over the word ‘sexy’ when another critic used it to describe a Gerhard Richter exhibition) collection of recent essay’s by Pac Pobric and out jumped Buchloh’s admission that art doesn't abandon it’s formative intentions but “….at a certain point acquiesces to the world”.

We can apply this inevitability to Grabovsky’s Holding Hands in the Subway a large canvas centered around what appears to be a lurid billowing stain as in Helen Frankenthaler’s discoveries, now undergoing a welcome reevaluation. Frankenthaler was the flowing bridge between Jackson Pollock and Color Field painting, but here any fluid lyricism is undercut with the discreet semblance of a small Ukrainian flag along the left side. I know this minimal blue and yellow symbol, my wife's Grandparents emigrated from Kyiv after the Russian Revolution. The flag is mostly obscured by a dark lozenge shape, maybe a bomb or something obscene and here the painting turns on a dime, the Baconian splash may even be an act of self-vandalization while shards of blue tear away into an angular maelstrom sloping below a puddle of rendered bruises. I may want to hold someones hand on the subway after engaging with this reverberating accomplished picture.

On My Knees is both the title of Alina Grabovsky’s first show at PICTURE THEORY and a physical position representing either capitulation or, in some faiths, prayer. 

Alina Grabovsky (b. 1987, Kyiv, Ukraine) lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Grabovsky holds a BFA in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, and an MFA from Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, Germany. Her work was included in exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg, New York; Dark City, Vienna; messing schwarz, Vienna; Haus der Wiener Kaufmannschaft, Vienna;  Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen, Germany;  and Marcus Ritter, Leipzig; among others.