mOlly gruninger

RE-CREATION

solo exhibition

August 1st - 31st, 2025

Opening Reception: First Friday, August 1st • 5-9pm​

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Arch Enemy Arts presents RE-CREATION by Molly Gruninger. A series of seven new paintings that elicit one of contemporary art’s most chronic questions—is it AI? Psychedelic overtones, elongated forms, and an ultrasmooth synthetic glow tell us that, in Gruninger’s work, that question is kind of the point. 

 

Working in oil on canvas, Molly Gruninger paints from photographs of lifesize models she’s sculpted by hand. For RE-CREATION, Molly worked with modeling clay on mannequins to form abstract shapes like the overedited hallucinations of text-to-image AI renderings. She painted her sculptures, adding metallics to produce accurate sources of light, shadow, and color. Then, she photographed them and sketched from the photographs, further manipulating her drawings to create distinguished details, forms, and facial features—all before even touching paint to canvas. 

 

“It’s about the unreality of the moment,” Gruninger explains. “I wanted to dive into the overwhelming influence felt by the onslaught of misinformation and how it’s shaping our inability to trust what we see and hear. I was inspired by the explosion of AI, the disconnect between what’s real and imagined, and the distorted transformation of ideas. RE-CREATION is about taking back those ideas through actual human creation.” 

 

To Molly’s credit, she documents much of her process and fidelity to traditional techniques on social media. One recent IG post shows her gently dry-brush blending the paint in “Hypno Schism,” not only to reinforce the painting’s dimensionality and ‘uncanny valley’ realism but also to highlight how the image was in fact made by the artist’s hand. Needless to say, we’re in awe of this work and even further struck by the artist’s process for creating it. It’s almost as if Molly has turned the generative machine learning model on its head, begging another (perhaps more interesting) question—who is imitating who?

 

Molly Gruninger (b. 1987) is currently based in Nashville, Tennessee and graduated from Ball State University in Indiana. She says that her “upbringing with a pilot dad and an art teacher mom” shaped her interest in art and an existential worldview, adding “I’ve always had my head in the clouds both literally and figuratively.” RE-CREATION is Molly’s debut solo feature with Arch Enemy Arts, and we are honored to welcome her to Philadelphia for the opening reception on First Friday, August 1st.

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RE-CREATION will be on view from August 1st - 31st, 2025
Sold works will begin to ship the week starting September 7th, unless other rush shipping arrangements have been made. 

Items marked with a red dot have already been sold.

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