Canadian artist Jude Griebel explores our relationship with the natural world, food, and farming practices with whimsical sculptures of animals, many of which carry protest signs. Created during residencies at the Leitrim Sculpture Center in Ireland and elsewhere, the sculptures are made of hand-carved wood that is then overlaid with air-dried modeling clay and acrylic paint. For works serving as harbingers of ecological collapse, they are surprisingly playful and humorous, recalling in style and expression the animals from folklore and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. Garrett Klein, cofounder of the Lower East Side’s Massey Klein gallery, told ARTnews that this is on purpose.
“[The aesthetic] provides a familiar entry point to these works that are talking about the environment and our entanglement with and encroachment on it,” he said, adding that the scale of Griebel’s sculptures far exceeds what could fit in a NADA booth. “We once had a seven-foot chicken in the gallery.”
