Michelle Grabner’s modestly scaled abstract paintings are neither mere formal exercises nor are they the products of her imagination or subconscious. Rather, Grabner looks for abstract motifs in the seemingly mundane things that surround her, for patterns that are merely waiting to be brought to light. In engaging both sides of the debate simultaneously, her work underlines the falseness of the abstraction/representation dichotomy. While her paintings mirror certain tendencies in Minimalist painting—for example, a predilection for evanescent, hand-drawn monochromatic grids that entirely fill