"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.

Born 1954, Cologne, Michael Krebber lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include The Living Wedge (Part II), Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2017); The Living Wedge, Serralves Museum, Porto, (2016); Greene Naftali, New York (2015); Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2015; Les escargots ridiculisés, CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, (2012); and Greene Naftali, New York (2011). His work is in the collection of Museum of Modern Art, New York; CAPC musée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Museum Brandhorst, Munich. He was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in 2015.