NEW YORK, NY.- Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert announce their first solo exhibition with artist Rashawn Griffin. The exhibition will include new installation and paintings by Rashawn.

He cultivates random rips and fringing as essential elements in the compositional whole, providing a specific textural character to formal set ups usually associated with more discrete and flat surfaces in oil or acrylic paintings...

… Griffin has found a way to exploit the structural elements of contemporary apparel—often the ubiquitous denim pant—collaging displaced pockets, grommets and zippers on a fabric surface like elements in an elegant abstract composition. ] --Lowery Stokes Sims, Threads Catalogue essay

Known for using domestic and everyday material, Griffin combines private knowledge with collective experience while expanding the boundaries of painting. A 2012 solo exhibition at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art featured a twenty-foot pennant with the words “Griffin, KS”. Hung from clotheslines that act like drawings in space, this motif is reflected in the exhibition at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert.

Often related to time and place, Griffin questions identity and history, while inviting viewers to reflect upon their own. By transforming commonplace objects and ephemera into something unmistakably different, he encourages viewers to recalibrate their own perspective. Griffin breaks apart images, materials, and language and recombines in unique arrangements—a storyteller in parts.

Every object is both itself and a memory of itself, or an appropriation of someone else’s memory of itself. Every object is both invested with emotion and accommodating of what happens to sit adjacent. Every object is both less and more than it seems. Every object has a history, elsewhere. --Catherine Lord, Griffin, KS catalogue essay

In addition to his recent solo exhibition at the Nerman, Griffin has been in a sequence of exceptional exhibitions including Black Now, Longwood Gallery, Bronx, New York; RSVP, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Freeway Balconies, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany, and the Whitney Biennial 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Griffin’s work is included in The Saatchi Collection, London; the Norton Collection, Los Angeles; The Studio Museum of Harlem in New York; Marti and Eileen Eisenberg, New York; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, and many more.