Carl Grauer, Portraits: The Art of Looking

A solo exhibit of portraits by Carl Grauer.  On View: December 20, 2024 – January 26, 2025.  Gallery hours:  Friday, Saturday and Sundays 12:00-5:00 pm  Reception:  Saturday, January 11, 2025 3:00-5:00 pm.  Receptions are always free and open to the public.

Statement and Bio

Carl Grauer is a painter based in Poughkeepsie, NY in the beautiful Hudson Valley. He explores the construction of identity, and how to memorialize objects and individuals through a contemporary documentarian approach to painting. He focuses on the documentation of time, memory, and imagination and how he may occupy the past, present, and future through these aspects. He is interested in the observation of that evolution of time and how it affects the artifice of the presentation of self, and finally, how by creating a painting, the art acquires an identity and timeline of its own.

Born in rural Kansas, Carl Grauer was raised in a town of 700 people and a graduating class of sixteen. He had a great aptitude of studies as well as art from a very young age but with a limited exposure to the arts. Following high school graduation he left to complete his degrees in human biology and his MFA from the University of Kansas and the University of Michigan, respectively. Eventually moving to New York City he found solace in the arts and culture in abundance. He spent two years in London studying figurative and portrait painting with several studios and garnered success showing work internationally, including exhibiting with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in London, being shortlisted for the 2015 Wells Art Contemporary Award in the UK. Carl Grauer is a painter based in Poughkeepsie, NY in the beautiful Hudson Valley.