NEW YORK, NY.- P·P·O·W announced the representation of Grace Carney and Mosie Romney.

Referencing Japanese Shunga, Baroque and Renaissance painting, contemporary media, and her own body, Grace Carney’s practice eschews easy categorization with two self-contained bodies of work: her large-scale works on paper and her paintings. Featuring entangled limbs and contorting musculature, Carney’s drawings explore the physical experience of the human body, blurring the lines between anger and love; aggression and submission; movement and confinement. Similarly, her gestural oil paintings reflect an underlying interest in liminal spaces, embracing the ambiguity and messiness of the paint itself. Beginning each painting from a place of discomfort or constraint, often restricting her palette, Carney creates layered compositions that are both bodily and abstract; physical and emotional; specific and open-ended. Wrestling with distinct personal narratives and relationships, Carney imbues the manifold layers of her paintings with traces of her emotional experience, burying them within the murkiness of the paint.

Working in the space between figuration and abstraction, Mosie Romney uses painting as a portal through which to explore themes of self-perception and polychronic time. A worldbuilder informed by a background in set design and puppetry, Romney stages fantasy worlds which disrupt our notions of nostalgia, memory, the archive, time, the past and the present. Recontextualizing images from a multitude of sources including family photo albums found on the internet, movie stills, literature, screen shots, dreams, and an evolving cast of characters continually recycled from previous works, Romney tells stories of empowerment and explores life as a multi-performative experience. Using fantasy as a tool to grapple with realities of daily life, Romney’s work conveys the emotional disposition of living in a society where contact across boundaries is constantly in variance. In their 2022 interview with Ben Fama in BOMB magazine, Romey states “I’ve been thinking about visibility and its complications, the satisfaction and limited subjectivity of seeing and being seen.”

Since its inception forty years ago, P·P·O·W has maintained a programmatic dedication to painting. Gallery co-founder Wendy Olsoff believes that “Mosie Romney is a great fit for the program as their practice connects to the radical history of narrative painters such as Martin Wong, who also began his career in set design. Likewise, we are excited to introduce Grace Carney to our program. As a painter who explores the female condition through figure drawing and abstraction, her visceral response is reminiscent of the early paintings of Carolee Schneemann. Both artists are strongly aligned with artists we currently represent such as Elizabeth Glaessner and Astrid Terrazas who explore fractured space and imaginary boundaries to investigate the chaotic disposition of the current historical moment."

Grace Carney (b.1992) received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, in 2014, and received her MFA in Painting from the New York Studio School, New York, NY, in 2022. Carney was awarded the Jane C. Carrol Scholarship in 2020-2022 and the Hohenberg Travel Grant in 2022. Her work has been exhibited in I’m Not Your Mother at P·P·O·W, New York, NY, and Three Women: Grace Carney, Jeane Cohen, Abigail Dudley at Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, New York, NY. Wrestle, her first solo exhibition in Europe, was on view at Beacon Gallery, Munich, Germany, in the winter of 2022. P·P·O·W will present Carney's first solo exhibition with the gallery in 2024.

Mosie Romney (b. 1994, New York City) lives and works between Ridgewood, Queens, and the Hudson Valley, New York. They received their BFA in Visual Art from SUNY Purchase in 2016 and have completed residencies with the Home School, Hudson, NY, and Pocoapoco, Oaxaca City, MX, among others. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Pond Society, Shanghai, CN; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, CN, among others. Romney’s work has been included in exhibitions at White Columns, New York, NY; Nicodim, Bucharest, RO, Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY; Greene Naftali, New York, NY; Gern en Regalia, New York, NY; Almine Rech, London, UK, and New York, NY;Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY, among others. Their work has been featured in articles in BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Juxtapoz, among others. Their first solo exhibition with P·P·O·W will open fall 2024.