“There is a poetry to the sculptures, as voids, arabesques, and asymmetries create a contrast between elegance and unease. Granwell also suggests a relationship to dance, not only within each “figure,” but also within the choreographed installation.”
“Alexis Granwell’s textural and evocative paper mache sculptures confront the viewer with the tactility of the medium and the artistic process behind it. Her ambiguous organic shapes are reminiscent of solidified smoke, billowing clouds, and skeletal remains. Layered paper in stormy colors ripple like oil on water, weaving in and out of the sculpture’s surface.”
“There is a confidence with which Anagnos and Granwell manoeuvre their work through the aesthetics we associate with various discursive spheres – semiotics, performance, archaeology, gender politics, migration, mapping and hierarchies of spatial orientation – that strikes me as both characteristic of contemporary pluralism and refreshing at a moment when so much figurative artwork equates identity with that work’s meaning.”
“these artists don’t present an escape from chaos—rather, they ask us to look, listen, and sit inside it. ”
“Intimate Immensity’s strength derives from its quiet concentration, which feels to me like resistance built for the long haul. It also strikes me as particular to the ideas and attitudes that seem only to develop inside the nurturing world of artist-run spaces. PAFA provided this space to Granwell — who has most often worked in artist-run spaces, in particular Tiger Strikes Asteroid — not as a means to co-opt alternative methods, but because it’s leaders seems to understand the supporting role it can play in the development of artists and curators.
Other major institutions in Philadelphia — the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation, and the Institute for Contemporary Art — should rise to this challenge. To meet this call would be to focus on the collective and the restorative, which as Bea Huff Hunter writes, is at the heart of Intimate Immensity.”
“The combined materials of paper, cement and wood make evident Granwell’s fascination with texture. Though common materials they result in sculptures that are elegant in form with highly individual personalities. ”
“They hint at human forms, too, though hers look like abstractions of wrestlers in contorted poses.”
“Alexis Granwell’s biomorphic body-scale papier-mache sculptures on geometric wood, Masonite, and brick plinths are centrally positioned in the gallery, inhabiting it like curvier, less severe versions of Louise Bourgeois’s groupings of Personages. The painterly quality of layered, almost-patchworked paper in soft blues, peaches, and indigos, which Granwell makes by hand, lends works like Opponents (2017) a sense of ruin–as if distressed, forgotten objects had been restored with an intimate touch.”
“dualistic, physically intimate yet violently fleshy sensibility”
“They’re an impressive balance of elegant and lumpen.”
“The surfaces communicate a specific material process involving handmade paper and papier-mâché, applied so that the forms appear to contain a historical record of layering, like a three-dimensional palimpsest.”
“the elemental unit of some unknown phenomenon, smoldering solar flare or dream architecture”
“Granwell’s marks add up to a confident plotting, a memory-map delineating lost territories on watery moonscapes, hinting at the familiar but bleeding into the purely abstract.”
“She combines the regularity of industrially-made materials with irregular forms that are not so much organic as distressed. They carry a history of prior use and obsolescence. The wall pieces employ angles that have the axiometric quality of Russian Constructivist art. It is striking that works cobbled-together of such irregular, cast-off materials appear so carefully-calibrated and balanced. They are elegant in their restraint.”
“paper and books have a tactile appeal that can’t be replaced.”
“a feeling of growing psychological tension and, from deep within the sculpture, its startling release.”