Blair Vaughn-Gruler makes paintings that are driven by procedure and process. Accumulation, repetition, erasure and the physical motions made in the process of mark making harken back to her many years practicing martial arts, and foregrounds the body’s relationship to painting.
A Michigan native and New Mexico transplant, Vaughn-Gruler has been obsessed with paint since childhood. Her spare, non-objective compositions are exercises in organizing space. Even when shapes or lines repeat themselves to excess, a calm arises out of the chaos.
As the conceptual love child of Cy Twombly and Agnes Martin, Vaughn-Gruler (born in 1955) makes paintings to reconcile her early modernist training with the lived experience of the information age.
She holds a BFA in painting from Northern Michigan University and an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Art.
