MZH’s paintings are the antithesis of that impassively handsome abstraction shaping present-day discourse. Like sticky sap, her paintings secrete their cognitive and material strain from every drip and mark, crack and edge. They are an excitable, albeit intimate gathering of gesticulations, junctures where color, material, and image rub hard against histories, texts, and signs. Because MZH is inadequate at “distancing,” she keeps the whole of painting close, often too close. But never at “arms-length.” If we are intellectually invested in painting we need to keep MZH in sight and her 95 Theses at our bedside.
    —Michelle Grabner