Hal Bromm is honored to present BURNING POINT, an exhibition of monumental paintings by Grace Graupe-Pillard opened on September 9, 2026. The exhibition will be on view at Hal Bromm/Tribeca through November 21, 2026.
The daughter of German Jewish refugees who fled Nazi persecution, and whose paternal grandparents died in Theresienstadt, Graupe-Pillard came of age with an acute awareness of injustice and a deep sensitivity toward those whom governments and societies overlook. Finding herself amidst a period of shifts in her personal life that coincided with the geopolitical fallout of 9/11, Graupe-Pillard’s work became saturated in imagery of disintegration, displacement, and fragmentation: “I document global genocide and the anguish of innocent civilians caught in a spiral of death and destruction… In a universe where terrorism, ethnic cleansing, environmental and cultural upheaval have dominated the news cycles, I look at the devastating impact of hostilities on the populace, with a visual dissolution of camouflage-like forms, fragmenting the picture plane as it does people’s lives.”
The body of work featured in BURNING POINT amplifies this feeling of dissolution; how the violence perpetrated against innocent lives becomes obfuscated against a backdrop of divisive politics and a news cycle fueled by sensationalism over truth. Taking after Goya, Graupe-Pillard distills the imagery of the headlines into large-scale ‘history paintings’ that begin to dissolve under the weight of a culture urging us to look away, even as the atrocities arrive on our doorstep.
Each painting begins with photographs which the artist then re-imagines through digital manipulation and recomposition; civilians become faceless shapes among the abstract reality of a war only experienced through the media, eruptions of flames are refracted through kaleidoscopic photo-composites. These alterations are reflective of the manner in which truth becomes distorted as information is filtered through algorithmic digital mediators, arriving on our screens only after it has been twisted into something almost unrecognizable. The imagery mirrors the fracturing of people’s lives under state violence.