Bio
Michael Grimaldi studied painting and drawing at the New York Studio School and the National Academy in New York, and at the Art Students League of New York, while also pursuing independent studies in anatomy and dissection at Drexel University College of Medicine. He has taught drawing, painting, and anatomy for over twenty years at various US institutions, including the School of Visual Arts, the National Academy, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Students League of New York, and at Drexel University College of Medicine’s Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience. During the course of his career, Grimaldi has received numerous awards, fellowships, and residencies, and has exhibited across the globe, from San Francisco and New York to Tokyo and Beijing.
Statement
“The two pieces included in this exhibition, Untitled (woman in interior) and The Contract, are mixed-media, painting/drawing hybrids that skirt and parallel an ongoing series of multimedia, monochromatic drawings and mixed-media works on paper inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s book Decameron. I used this series as a starting point to investigate the parallels between the bubonic plague quarantines of 14th-century Europe and my own experiences throughout the Covid-19 lock-downs over the past three years. Rather than treating the series as directly-referenced illustrations of the stories told within Decameron, I chose to create a body of work that consists of my observed experiences within the familiar, personal, and banal, juxtaposed against imagined scenarios and unreliable memories of experiences that may or may not have happened.
Although The Contract and Untitled predate the Decameron series, I look at them as a launching point that catalyzed, inspired – and were eventually incorporated into – this ongoing series.”
