Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to announce Ellen Gronemeyer’s third solo exhibition in New York. For DÉJÀ VU, the Berlin-based artist presents twelve new oil paintings and, for the first time, five small tables. Positioning the imaginary space of a painting alongside functional objects, the exhibition considers the act of looking, and the permeability of fantasy and reality.

Gronemeyer’s studio practice is led by her materials, and an unconscious process. Working on many compositions simultaneously, the paint itself becomes a central protagonist. Each finished work is built up of many layers of oil paint, creating a friction between image and surface. The artist’s bold color palette is tempered with black and white, bringing depth and luminosity.

Gronemeyer’s figures evoke precarity, whether depicted alone or in groups. Feelings of isolation and containment are sparked by the paintings’ cropping. In Single Bed, a woman stands alone on a mattress in an otherwise abstract landscape; the mattress becomes like a life raft in a vast ocean. One step forward, and she would be absorbed into the abyss.

Characters merge with their surroundings, shifting states of matter. In Sidekick, elongated arms dissolve into vaporous white lines. Spider and I depicts a translucent glowing monolith. In Carrera, two faces are woven into a circuitous racetrack, their outlines becoming part of a map. The checkered patterning of Stormshutters suggests the texture of a hard tile floor, while the superimposed squares in the center create an optical illusion of depth. In a playful act of appropriation, Gronemeyer turns the neutrality of Richter’s grid and Albers’ square on their ear, asserting the power of painterly brushstrokes and intimate scale.

The artist’s figurative works consider the dialectic of seeing and being seen. This is most clearly demonstrated in Eurovision, a tightly cropped painting that breaks the fourth wall. A woman looks straight ahead, pointing her TV remote at the viewer. Which button she is pressing is unclear: is it pause, mute, fast forward, rewind?

Gronemeyer extends her layering technique to a new format; turning paintings into tables. In these works, she adds pieces of broken glass on top of painted abstractions and finishes them with a layer of epoxy resin. There is a tension here between unity and disintegration; pieces wanting to become whole again. Set flat on top of metal bases at different heights, the artist plays with the viewer’s vantage point to create a spatial limbo.