“She calls it kitsch of the best kind. On canvas it reads like courage: color, humor, tenderness, bite.”
First listen: pictures that sing
First impression: the paintings feel like songs you already know, only brighter. A bird, a bag, a rider, a face: Gabrielle Grässle takes legible things and tunes them until they glow.
She speaks in a grammar of outlines and large planes of color, then slips in a line of text or a wink of glitter that flips sweetness into sly critique.
The result is not naïve. It is strategic simplicity, the kind that clears space for feeling.
Gabrielle Grässle at Alzueta Gallery
Grässle’s recent trajectory reads clearly in the rooms that host her: in 2025 she opened “Daisy Days” at Pulpo Gallery in Murnau.
In 2024 she presented “Himmelblau” at Ainori Gallery in Lisbon, “Carambole” at Alzueta Gallery in Madrid, and “On the Milky Way” at Simchowitz Gallery in Los Angeles.
These venues suit her bright, decisive language where pop sign and personal memory meet, giving the work a public stage without dulling its nerve.
Lineage: color and wit
Grässle grew up on the edges of Zürich with music, comics, and Paul Klee within reach. That lineage shows: color as structure, drawing as thinking, humor as a tool.
Gabrielle Grässle with all Art Dealers and Available works on Artsy
Later came Matisse and a taste for bold economy. Add a more contemporary appetite for pop, fashion, and signage and you get an image that appears childlike at distance and sharp on approach.
The paintings are friendly first, decisive second.
Method: drawing as engine
Process matters here. She works in series, often with multiple canvases open at once.
Drawing is the starter fluid: quick sheets of shapes, faces, objects, words.
Dominique Catherina Foertig
16 Artists - Gabriele Graessle
Those sketches do not illustrate the paintings, they provoke them. A curved line becomes a shoulder, a bag, a hill.
A word becomes rhythm. When a block arrives she returns to drawing, not as therapy but as method, and the cycle restarts with fresh edges.
Place: Spain as operating system
Her studio is rural Spain, a renovated cortijo that runs on sun and quiet. The environment is not an anecdote, it is an operating system.
Fewer interruptions mean bolder decisions. You can feel that in the way she lets a pink hold a whole sky or allows a black field to carry the room.
Dominique Catherina Foertig
Gabrielle Grässle works With Artist and Curator Erik Sommer at Mott Projects
The paintings ask for clarity, then reward the viewer with layers: the shiny surface of pop culture next to the warm grain of memory, a comic outline beside a devotional hush.
Purposeful kitsch, precise tune
Grässle once described her work as “colorful, abstract, and kitsch.” If kitsch, then purposeful.
She takes motifs the culture thinks it already owns and returns them with a pulse that is hers.
All Painters on Munchies Art Club Magazine
Luxury branding, folk pattern, animal icon, handwritten caption: she uses them like notes. The tune is not nostalgia.
It is presence. Her pictures belong to the very old practice of telling truths with simple shapes.
Afterglow: permission and precision
What lingers is the permission structure these paintings create.
Permission to enjoy color without apology. Permission to read humor as intelligence.
Permission to see autobiography not as confession but as tool: the record collector’s ear, the walker’s eye, the memory of a book leafed in childhood.
Grässle’s world is welcoming, then exacting. It invites you in, then asks you to stay long enough to notice how carefully it is built.
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