Ann Toebbe: Tornado Warning

A new site-specific installation, 2024

Evoking the midwestern skies at the onset of a tornado, an emerald green glow is your guide through Ann Toebbe’s mother’s basement just as it must have been in 1985. Tornado Warning is a theatrical rendition of Toebbe’s childhood, in which you are the performer. Through low light you find your way past the spool table overloaded with laundry detergent (hinting at a mother’s work which is never done), to the safety nook underneath the stairs which Mrs. Toebbe made cozy with a blanket, candlelight and nostalgic crackers. A concurrently scary and magical space to wait out the storm while time stands still.

Ann Toebbe (b. 1974, Cincinnati, Ohio), Ann Toebbe received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1997. She earned an MFA in painting from Yale University in 2004 and a DAAD Scholarship to the Universität der Kunst, Berlin in 2004-05. The primary focus of her paintings is domestic life. Toebbe’s process is labor intensive, employing freehand painting, flat geometry, geometric abstraction and intricate patterning. Her paintings are often multi-media works with furniture and objects collaged on the surface cut from paper the artist paints in her studio. Drawing on folk art and Indian Miniature paintings her compositions play with flatness and multiple points of view. Each painting can simultaneously have inside and outside views, views from above, and objects and figures portrayed from a straight on view.

She has been the recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship in 2003 and a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2005 and 2015. She received a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant in 2015 for travel to India. Her work has been shown in solo and group shows in the US and Europe, notably the MCA (Chicago), the Saatchi Gallery (London), Steven Zevitas Gallery (Boston), and Monya Rowe Gallery (New York). Toebbe lives in Chicago and is represented by TIbor de Nagy (New York) and Steven Zevitas (Boston).