"All languages being cousins beneath the skin, in other words?”

—Ian Watson, The Embedding

Greene Naftali is pleased to announce Michael Krebber’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery, and his first since the artist relocated to New York City. The exhibition features new paintings based on iterations of coded painterly gestures, executed in only two colors. These gestures, which repeat and accrue across the exhibition, transform into an assembly of signifiers that read like a novel. Michael Krebber’s practice has consistently been characterized by strategies that offer a distinct commentary. on painting and art exhibitions, functioning by establishing and obliterating its own constitutive elements in order to tell a joke that continues again and again. With this new body of work the artist moves towards a blur of painterly and textual structures that establish a visual grammar through an abstract compositional method. The interlacing goes back and forth, interweaving the blank ground of the canvas into the painting, resurfacing fore- and background. The paintings in this exhibition play a dual role, as an essence in and of themselves. Yet with their contingency upon a highly coded system, these works do not offer to complete or resolve.