Grant Vetter is a catalog covering the Coral / Choral works that were inspired by the loss of mamy of the world's choral reefs and the growing effects of ecological devestation. They were first exhibited at Garboushian Gallery in Beverly Hills alongside the work of David Lachapelle in an exhibition entitled "Consumptive".
LA Times critic Shana Nys Dambrot wrote that "Grant Vetter’s maximalist aesthetic gives rise to kaleidoscopic abstract paintings with impasto so thick it threatens to take the wall on which it hangs crashing down with it."
These works went on to be exhibited at the Pitzer Gallery in the Center for Social Inquiry in Claremont, the Werkstatt Gallerie in Berlin, LA><Art in Culver City, the Thompson Gallery at the Cambridge School of Weston, UCITY Art Museum in China, Gallery Lara in Tokyo, Torrance Art Museum in southern California, Runnels Gallery in New Mexico, and the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Ana.
His work has been included in exhibitions by curators like Lucy Lippard and Edward Lucie-Smith and recieved write-ups in Art Forum, the Los Angeles Times, Direct Art and other magazines.
With over twenty-five years of experience in the arts, Dr. Grant Vetter has served as a curator for Fine Art Complex (Head Curator and Executive Director), Artlink (Director of Curatorial Projects), Arizona State University (Galleries Director), Mesa Community College (Senior Galleries Coordinator), Autonomie Arts (Head Curator) and the Foundation for Art Resources (Curator and Board Member). He regularly writes reviews of art exhibitions and is the author of The Architecture of Control: A Contribution to the Critique of the Science of Apparatuses (Zero Books), which proposed an entirely new lexicon for how we can understand relations of power/knowledge in the twenty-first century.
He has been an instructor at the Pacific Northwest College of the Arts, the School for Science and Architecture, Arizona State University, the Norton Simon Museum and the California African American Museum. Dr. Vetter completed his Post-Doc in the International Curators Program at the NODE Center for Curatorial Studies and holds advanced degrees from the European Graduate School, University of California, Irvine and the Critical Theory Institute. He completed his undergraduate degree at the Art Center College of Design. During his time as a student, he was the recipient of the Bradford Hall Arts Scholarship, the San Marino League Arts Scholarship, the Pasadena Art Alliance Scholarship, the Art Center College of Design Scholarship and a UCI Teaching Fellowship. He was a two time winner of the Orange County Grant for the arts, a winner of the international contest M.F.A. NOW and a bronze medalist in the Drafting Olympics.
Ab-Extradition is a catalog covering more than a decade of work by Grant Vetter. Essays by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, Canadian art critic Christabel Wiebe and internationally reknowned poet Marko Zlomislic all contribute readings of Vetter's work that show how abstraction is a process that is intimately connected to social, economic and political conflict.
Excerpts
"Vetter's paintings graphically illustrate the marriage of form and concept in fusing the corporeal and the political. Vetter's work is a tricky proposition in relation to history, calling up numerous and seemingly dissonant issues such as the history of Abstract Expressionism, America's involvment in doubious and bloody acts on foreign soil, and the museological critique inherent in a suite of paintings entitled Internment, Collateral, and Vestige." - Christabel Wiebe
"It is this meeting of agreement and disagreement which allows the aesthetic experience to be politically significant." - Jacques Rancière
"...there you already feel skeleton underneath the varnished skin trying to leap through tissue, sinews, frayed nerves amd muscle... The Real seeps in through the cracks of the imagination to leave its stain." - Marko Zlomislic