Michelle Grabner

Untitled (Blue)

Permanent Outdoor Installation

MOWA | West Bend

About the Installation

Bookend to MOWA’s Landscape

Permanent Outdoor Installation

MOWA | West Bend

Artist Michelle Grabner skillfully negotiates a number of roles in her art practice and in her output. She is a leading educator, serving on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University, as well as being a frequent contributor to leading arts magazines and running artist spaces. Her artwork is informed as much by her extensive knowledge of art history and its considerations as by her choice of media and specific subject. She works in painting, printmaking, and, as dramatically illustrated here, sculpture.

Untitled (Blue) is one of three colossal steel sculptures executed in the three primary colors: blue, red, and yellow. That choice alone underscores the immediacy and assertiveness that mark the series. Another foundational aspect of the works is the subject itself: a bookend. Not just any bookend, but the most humble and familiar form of that unassuming object. By radically altering the scale and then placing the very large piece outdoors instead of on a busy bookshelf, Grabner endows the simple form with an entirely new life and meaning.

When is a bookend not a bookend? When it attains human scale and transforms into a portal. Here, at MOWA, it offers a window to the surrounding landscape and an invitation to the museum and to the very act of seeing. As earlier artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Jeff Koons so effectively accomplished, Grabner persuades us to reflect on our material world and see in it what we typically ignore or overlook.

Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Blue), 2024
Powder-coated steel, 96 x 72 x 60 inches
2025 acquisition
Purchase, with funds from the
Thomas J. Rolfs Family Foundation