Grimes Is Selling Her Soul to the Highest Bidder—Among Other Works of Art—in Her Debut Gallery Show at Maccarone

The Canadian singer and musician Grimes is also an artist, it
turns out, and she’s unveiling more than a decade’s worth of her
visual work in a joint online presentation with Maccarone Los Angeles and
GalleryPlatform.LA, a collaborative new
online initiative from sixty Los Angeles
galleries.

“I made art 10, 12 years before I ever touched a keyboard,”
Grimes told Bloomberg. “I see
myself as a visual artist first and foremost, and I’ve always felt
strange that people know me for music.”

Grimes, who was born Claire Boucher, has hinted at her visual
talents in the past. She designs her own tour merchandise and the
cover art for all of her albums, and she has teamed up with her
brother Mac Boucher to create her music videos.

The show, titled “Selling Out,” features drawings, prints,
photographs, and conceptual work, including a legal document
that entitles its buyer to a percentage of her soul. Initially,
Grimes toyed with the idea of pricing the work, titled Selling
Out, at $10 million, but thought better of it as the world
began to descend into financial collapse. The document will now be
sold for the “best offer.”

The rest of the work is relatively affordable. Dealer Michele
Maccarone, who also gave comedian and actor Jim Carrey his first
gallery show, has priced Grimes’s manga-influenced prints at
$500, in editions of 30, and ink-on-paper drawings from $2,000 to
$3,000.

The exhibition also marks the fine art debut of Grimes’s digital
avatar, scanned from her own body and dubbed “WarNymph.” She was
inspired to create the avatar, which now has its own social media
channels, as a result of her growing aversion to photoshoots.
Pregnant and working to promote her fifth studio
album, Miss Anthropocene, released February 21,
Grimes wondered what it would be like if a digital stand-in could
take on that work for her.

“WarNymph,” created with Grimes’s brother Mac, appears in a
series of prints (priced at $5,000 to $15,000), and a seven-minute
video, as yet unpriced. The avatar will be an ongoing project in
which it ages, dies, and eventually regenerates.

The singer also made headlines earlier this month when she named
her first child, with tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, X Æ A-12. This week,
the couple announced that they were changing the spelling to
X Æ A-XII in
accordance with California law, which only permits letters, not
numerals, on birth certificates.

See more work from the exhibition below.

“Grimes: Selling Out” is on view with Gallery Platform Los
Angeles May 28–June 3, 2020, and Maccarone Los Angeles, May
28–August 31, 2020.

The post Grimes Is Selling Her Soul to the Highest
Bidder—Among Other Works of Art—in Her Debut Gallery Show at
Maccarone appeared first on artnet News.