THE SKY WAS NEVER MEANT TO HOLD US
Galerie Sara Lily Perez is pleased to present "The Sky Was Never Meant to Hold Us,"
a duo exhibition by Christiane Grimm and John Vitale, marking Vitale’s Berlin debut and Grimm’s first exhibition at Galerie SLP.Exploring the boundaries of perception, materiality, and movement, Grimm and Vitale challenge the limits of physical and visual space. Grimm’s ethereal, light-responsive acrylic works dissolve rigid form into a dynamic interplay of shadow, reflection, and refraction, shifting as the viewer moves. Vitale’s gestural abstractions, built through layering and revision, transform surface into rhythm where color, shape, and structure resonate in a state of flux.
At the core of Christiane Grimm’s work is the exploration of color, light, and perception, and how these elements shift in response to time and space. Her work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including a major show at Bluerider Art Gallery in Taipei, solidifying her international presence in the contemporary art scene.
As Grimm describes: "Colors, whether soft pastels, deep dark tones, or luminous pure hues, merge, separate, or stand side by side, always influencing us in unexpected ways. Light refracts or reflects off different surfaces, shifting in response to time, space, and perspective. The interaction of these elements creates an ever-changing visual experience, where depth emerges, weight dissolves, and perception remains in motion." Grimm's reflective wall works exist in a state of flux, where the viewer’s movement and changing illumination redefine their presence in real time.
For John Vitale, painting is a way to deconstruct and make sense of the chaos that permeates everyday life, a process of layering materials as a tangible archive of time and experience. His work has been exhibited in key galleries and museums, including Chefas Projects, a pivotal contemporary art platform, highlighting his growing influence in the abstract art world.
As Vitale explains: "My work is an ongoing investigation of the human experience, an attempt to deconstruct and make sense of the chaos that permeates everyday life. Painting is both a method of compartmentalization and expansion, a means of breaking apart experiences while simultaneously creating something entirely new. At its core, my work is about movement and rhythm, a process of trust in the unknown, where the smallest decision can open up an entirely new path forward." Vitale's richly layered paintings invite close engagement, offering a sense of rhythm and motion that unfolds through gesture, color, and structure.
Together, Grimm and Vitale’s works propose a world where perception is fluid, where light and pigment never fully settle, and where meaning unfolds in an ever-evolving dialogue.
The exhibition’s title, "The Sky Was Never Meant to Hold Us," reflects themes of transformation and impermanence, suggesting that art, like perception itself, resists containment. This is an invitation to experience material as responsive, form as evolving, and vision as an active, ever-changing process.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Christiane Grimm (1957, Stuttgart, DE)
Since the mid-1980s, Christiane Grimm has been creating color and light spaces, focusing her research on the luminosity of color, its nuances, combinations, and effects on viewers. A trained architect and self-taught artist, Grimm works with various materials, including oils, acrylics, pastels, Perspex, antique glass, and ribbed glass. She creates visual objects, architectural light sculptures, and boxes that explore how color perception is influenced by lighting and material. Her works often feature milky ribbed glass that refracts light, producing a variety of hues and a sensual effect resulting from the interplay between color, composition, space, material and lighting.
John Vitale (1979, Illinois, USA)
Vitale is a self-taught abstract painter whose work explores the complexities of human experience. Vitale's paintings are characterized by organic shapes, lines, plateaus, and rich color palettes, creating captivating visual narratives. Vitale employs a meticulous process, often spending weeks on a piece, where minor adjustments, such as a single mark or color shift, can bring a painting to its resolution. He utilizes a combination of acrylics, house paint, enamels, pencils, canvas scraps, and oil sticks, layering materials to archive time and experience tangibly.