Grace Graupe-Pillard's "Burning Point" at Hal Bromm Gallery Reworks News Photos into Near-Abstractions

Key facts

• "Grace Graupe-Pillard: Burning Point" is on view at Hal Bromm Gallery, 90 West Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY, through November 21, 2026.
• Grace Graupe-Pillard's 1986 breakout exhibition was "Urban Life Cutouts," and she became known as a photo-realist painter of people over a six-decade career.
• In "Burning Point," she starts from news photos, sometimes combining multiple images, and digitally filters and simplifies them in Photoshop to create high-contrast color shapes.
• Compositions are worked out on a computer, then projected onto canvas as traced shapes, with larger, bolder forms painted with smooth edges.
• Works in the show include Gaza City (2007, oil on canvas, 65 x 96 inches), Strikes (2003, oil on wood, 24 x 30 inches), Camp Xray (2002, oil on wood, 24 x 30 inches), Blast Wave (2012, oil on canvas, 62 x 90 inches), and SCOTUS quashing my V (2026, oil on wood, 36 x 48 inches).
• The large-scale Gaza City memorializes an earlier wave of destruction there between Hamas and Fatah rather than detailing it.
• Two more recent works, Lincoln Memorial and Protester and SCOTUS Quashing my V, experiment with politicized super-impositions.
• Graupe-Pillard has been banned from YouTube for posting topical satires using her nude body, and is a grandchild of the Holocaust.
• The review was contributed by P. C. Smith, the pen name of artist Paul Lake Smith.