[ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: WITH ANNOTATIONS BY THE ARTIST]
INTRODUCTION
In a time when many Americans feel isolated and policy experts ponder solutions to the “loneliness epidemic,” Grace Metzler’s paintings often depict togetherness—parents and young children, lovers, sports teams, roller skaters at a rink, dancers, even, in an older work, a pair of Benjamin Franklin impersonators coming home to their pet cats. Sometimes this togetherness is chaotic. Someone is going to get hurt, or something is going to get broken. In When the Performance Goes Wrong, four dancers appear to be in the process of falling to the floor. In other scenes, kids play hockey inside the house or a women having a massage by the pool gets a foot in the face. In a virtual studio visit with me this summer, Metzler said that she often paints pile-ups of bodies, characters who have decided “Let’s make a tower out of ourselves!” But the exuberance of the paintings suggests that the risk is often worth taking. Even when things seem off-kilter, her characters often appear joyful and absorbed in their pursuits. Metzler isn’t mocking them—they also ski and dance and have parties in horse barns without disaster. They’re surrounded by loved ones.
Shared endeavors have always been central to Grace Metzler’s life. Metzler is one of four children; growing up, she spent summers on her maternal grandparents’ farm in upstate New York, the only “city kid” among cousins who were adept at outdoor work. During the school year, her mother wanted her to try every sport, from figure skating to crew, and she did. The family often offered space in their home to friends or church community members in need, which meant that Metzler and her siblings had many adults looking out for them. Now an aunt to six nieces, Metzler often paints mothers and children. “I like to paint moms with lots of bags around them,” Metzler laughs. “I love to show how capable they are.” Metzler also paints chosen families, whether artists working together in a studio or queer social groups. After several years of painting in Brooklyn and moving around the east coast, Metzler has returned to Philadelphia, where her mother lives and where she now shares a studio with friends. She says that she finds Philadelphia’s art community especially warm and supportive. About the motifs in her art, she says, “I like productivity that is a group effort. I like depicting people having a shared experience, and everyone has a voice.”
Even amid the life of a big family, Metzler found time to create and dream on her own. Her paternal grandfather was an architect and taught her how to draw. When she was eight he showed her three-point perspective and she spent her free time drawing imaginary Wild West ghost towns. One of her family’s boarders introduced her to The Twilight Zone as a child, and the uncanny stories made a big impression. This affinity for imagination and narrative is clear in Metzler’s paintings, whose (often very funny) titles usually suggest a story. Metzler says that the paintings are not directly autobiographical, though sometimes she draws on places and experiences from her own life, as in a recent painting, Renewal Happens in an Old Room, in which she gives the protagonist her own childhood bedroom and Hoka sneakers and orange cat.
Metzler’s figures are invented and their likes and wants and histories take shape in her mind as she paints them. Sometimes when she is stuck, she writes stories about the characters. Metzler’s early paintings were often more surreal, with appearances from a long-horned devil or a pink cone of light that looks ready to beam up a mass of lovers and children seated on blue horses. Now much of her inspiration is drawn from the humor, joy, and pain of ordinary life, which can be surreal enough itself. Sometimes her cavorting figures appear hapless or confused, but Metzler does not want to paint them as caricatures. “I need to see the light in their eyes,” she says. She takes care to make them individuals, with dimension and the capacity to surprise. Like many or most people today, they are prone to being confused and “distracted.” But it’s important to her to see them as able to change their minds.
In 2025, Metzler received shocking news—an electrical fire at the Nunu Fine Art gallery in Taipei destroyed almost a dozen of her paintings. No one was hurt, and she is working with the owner to recover the financial loss, but the damage to her canvases was deeply painful. Since then, however, she has found solace in a new body of work. During our Zoom studio tour, she showed several large-scale canvases in progress, which both extend her interests in intimacy and community and present them in even greater depth, with rich, gorgeous coloration, emotional resonance, and wry humor. Right now she is hesitant to impose a conceptual framework on the series, and is exploring the paintings themselves and what they seem to want to be.
Metzler says that as she paints, she tries to give her figures, who come to feel like real people to her, the most enjoyable experience possible, to make them feel present and embodied. In the process, she extends that generosity to viewers, perhaps helping us feel less lonely and more open-hearted ourselves.
C. J. Bartunek
Images © 2026 Grace Metzler. All images are acrylic and oil on canvas.