Anna GREBNER

Color as evidence, material as memory: In her installations and pictorial works, Anna Grebner explores color as a bearer of traces of cultural practices and as an archive of ecological spaces. Her paintings are at once a site and a finding. She works with pigments of her own making—derived from plants, earths, and organic residues—thereby directly inscribing the surrounding nature into her works. The textiles used as supports are pre-treated with earth, bone, and grass.

This process gives rise to pictorial spaces in which body, material, and environment reciprocally shape one another. For Grebner, color thus functions not merely as a medium, but as a repository of place, time, and touch. The works speak of landscapes, of the traces of human presence, and of the fragile relationship between humanity and the environment. Her practice aims to dissolve the supposed separation between body, material, and environment, and to foster an awareness of responsibility, of finitude, and of the scale of human intervention.

Water, as a material, symbolic, and mythologically charged force, is central to her visual language. Her depictions of the body, transferred onto old textiles of familial significance, are formally supported by aqueous graphite traces that delicately cascade across the thin fabric panels in a gentle flow, coalescing into intertwined figures. The result is a precise image of our entanglement with the environment and the corporeality of water in its ecological fragility. The works are also chemical fields. The textiles have been dyed with indigo, woad, and earths. Alkaline and acidic processes alter the pH value, mirroring the increasing acidification of the oceans. In a quiet performative gesture during an exhibition, Grebner dissolved a mussel shell in acidic water each day. The shell is thus elevated to a symbol of a silent disappearance, making the entanglement of skin and sea, body and element, palpable. Matter vanishes. What remains is AC-25, a pigment derived from the shell's remnants, unassuming and brown, yet shimmering with a fine mother-of-pearl luster in transmitted light. A final index of the living.

Grebner's pictures also respond to space, air, and light. Freely suspended works oscillate between line, gesture, and movement, opening a dialogue with the viewer. She is versed in traditions ranging from Old Master drawing to Nihonga, employing them without becoming lost in them. In Okinawa (2023/24), she recently linked centuries-old Japanese painting techniques with a clear-eyed diagnosis of the present. In 100 times you & I running down the sink (2023/24), indigo-dyed woodcuts on the business pages of Japanese newspapers show how material and economic imagery converge.