Claire Milbrath

GOD SHAPED HOLE

November 13, 2021 – January 1, 2022

de boer is pleased to announce God Shaped Hole, a solo exhibition by Claire Milbrath. The artist’s first solo with the gallery featuring new work expanding on a practice of narrative painting.

Claire Milbrath’s paintings furnish a world fixated on an autobiographical character. ‘Gray’ – a proxy to Milbrath herself providing a pathway for the multitudes of one self. The beginning of a way to enable abstract possibilities. Milbrath’s process begins by unpacking personal experiences and filling that void with aspirations. In each setting small symbols of love and joy abound, tulips in a vase, baked cakes, bags of oranges, and freshly brewed coffee.

Milbrath’s paintings find their settings in the likes of kitchens, bathrooms, and living rooms where-in Gray is found with a cast of fluffy bichon dogs. Each work set in situational circumstances ranging from the very ordinary – enjoying one’s morning with coffee and a domesticated companion - to intimate and strange - kneeling in prayer by the light of the moon on the floor of a bathroom – Milbraths’s projections thread a connection through their unassuming settings. A kitchen becomes the ultimate space of love and joy. The bathroom, a personal cathedral of isolation and yearning.

Each picture becomes wholesome by nature, shameless by experience connecting and disconnecting the conflated symbolism and relationships of object, place, and self. As-if by expressing a commitment to the sublime of day to day life and the rituals and relationships that make up the sum of human existence one can indelibly begin the process of filling a metaphorical god shaped hole.

Claire Milbrath (b.1989) is a self-taught artist working with painting, sewing, and drawing. Adopting an artistic style reminiscent of the Naive Painters, Milbrath incorporates large swaths of lush color to construct her compositional space, renewing the coloristic tradition with vignettes relating to unrequited love, sexual fantasies, and childhood innocence. In her recent body of work Milbrath discloses biographical elements in her paintings to harmonize aspirations into her personal life. She has been actively exhibiting her work in recent years in both solo and group exhibitions. Recent exhibitions were presented at Project Pangée, Montreal, (2021); Steve Turner, Los Angeles, (2020); Marie-Laure Fleisch, Brussels, (2019). She is the editor-in-chief and founder of Editorial Magazine.

Selected Works

Installation Views

EXHIBITION CATALOG

Artists