Burning Down the Second House
Frames ship to U.S. addresses only. Framed prints ship in 2–4 weeks and are final sale. Full framing details
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Frames ship to U.S. addresses only. Framed prints ship in 2–4 weeks and are final sale. Full framing details
Add Custom Frame
Frames ship to U.S. addresses only. Framed prints ship in 2–4 weeks and are final sale. Full framing details
I paint from memory. I choose a place that I can recall in detail, like my parent's home in Ohio or my grandmother's farm in Indiana. I place everything as I remember it and render all the elements of the space up to the same level of detail, which allows me to include everything I want to remember about the room in one picture. I have discovered that combining minute detail with multiple viewpoints in the same flat surface results in a sort of folk-cubism, or maybe a skewed naturalism_ which is what those memories feel like. Living on the East Coast made me acutely aware of the aesthetics of my Midwestern upbringing. My experiences in New York and at Yale University cast my family's home and lifestyle in a different light; a pragmatic, mundane (and rather flat) sense of beauty, unburdened by high ideas or refinements of style. The combination of my earlier working class tastes and the later-acquired, intensely cosmopolitan awareness of style has shaped who I am as a painter. I am influenced by Grandma Moses and Horace Pippin, Stuart Davis and Matisse. As historical precedents, I draw on the work of other female artists like Florine Stettheimer, whose paintings also fall somewhere between sophisticated and provincial. While my paintings are rigorous in purely formal terms of design, shape, space and color, they are also just pictures of home_ kitchens, Catholic churches and farmhouses.
Born in 1974 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ann Toebbe received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1997. She earned an MFA in painting from Yale University in 2004 and a DAAD Scholarship to the Universität der Kunst, Berlin in 2004-05. She has been the recipient of numerous grants including a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, 2005 and 2015, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant, 2015, and a Chicago Dcase Grant, 2017 and IL Council for the Arts Grant, 2018. In 2017 Toebbe was AiR at The Pilchuck School of Glass. Her work has been shown at The MCA Chicago, The Elmhurst Art Museum, and The Fralin Museum of Art and galleries including Monya Rowe, NY and Zevitas Marcus, Los Angeles. In 2019 Toebbe had solo exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy, NY where she is represented and in the gallery at The Heimbold Visual Arts Center at Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY.