“Under the Map Room”
Exhibition Dates: 5 October–10 November, 2019
Opening Reception:
Sunday, 6 October. 6-8pm
A book on Elliott Green’s work will be published on the occasion of this exhibition.
Available at Pierogi and at artbook.com on November 1st
Hardbound 224 pages
French folded pages with four foldout posters
Edition of 1000
$40
To purchase or reserve a book email or call the gallery
Press Release
We are delighted to present our second solo exhibition of paintings by Elliott Green, titled “Under the Map Room,” on view from October 5 through November 10, 2019, with an opening reception on Sunday, Ocober 6, from 6-8pm. These new paintings evolve from Green’s earlier works and continue to be “full of geological action and meteorological exuberance. Mountains jut, glaciers pour into the sea, tectonic plates collide, hills roll, lava burns. And throughout, all kinds of brushes and tools enable an entire palette’s worth of colors to flow, stutter, twist, suffuse and fold, while freehand additions à la de Kooning…occasionally flit about. Exreme artifice prevails with photography and animation lurking just offstage. And the subterranean subtext rears it’s ugly head: human nature’s ignorant abuse of nature nature.” (Roberta Smith)
The natural environment, as much as paint itself, is a character inhabiting these works. “‘Heavy Shit in Candy Land’ (2019), featur[es] a charred landscape that conjures an…apocalyptic scenario. The work recalls the tragic beauty of Max Ernst’s visionary landscape ‘Europe After the Rain (1940-42),’ a Surrealist ode to a world that has been ravaged by ‘the rain,’ or aerial bombing in World War II.” Other paintings, such as “California,” “Inhale, Exhale,” “Purificatory Rains,” “Navigator,” and “Seismic Trill” exhibit a more optimistic view that “…suggests that with wit, humor, and an extraordinary vision, all sorts of natural and humanmade calamities might be averted.” (David Ebony)
Green continues to employ all permutations of purchased, found, altered, and fabricated tools to apply paint in a unique vocabulary of alternately sinuous and undulating, coiling, stuttering, scraped, and angular forms. He “…deliberately brings multiple applications to bear in a single painting. The result is an entangled, jarring combination of twisting, coiling forms; gradient, monochromatic planes; striated shapes; furling clouds and bulbous silhouettes. The painting’s surface varies throughout, from dry and granular to buttery smooth. The imaginative, reflective space that these unlikely combinations open up is unlike anything else being done in contemporary landscape painting, an innovative feat that many have claimed was no longer possible.” (John Yau)
In Green’s turbulent paintings a rugged geology begins to take form only to be abruptly disrupted by a kinetic gesture, where emerging natural forms rupture into abstraction. In paintings such as “Telephathic Reverb,” “Waves and Vibrations,” “Dirty Gravity,” and “Under the Map Room,” just as a swirl of paint seems to solidify into a swath of sky, a jagged line emerge as a mountain or ridge, just as swiftly, a schism occurs and a smear or angle of paint reveals itself to be entirely abstract, pulling us out of the impulse to pareidolia, to see something representational in a stroke of paint. Ebony writes “[r]ather than depicting any real mountains…Green’s rocky vista seems emblematic of anything insurmountable or unapproachable.” Inserting elements “…like a single bravura brushstroke, is a purely abstract device that breaks the illusion of the infinite landscape, reminding the viewer that this, after all, is just paint-on-canvas.” Through their rapid sequencing, layering, and strata-like formation, Green’s paintings reveal the passage of time and their own kind of evolution.
This exhibition will include recent paintings ranging in size from 16 x 12 inches to 90 x 70 inches. It will be accompanied by a hard bound book published on the occasion of the exhibition, including essays by John Yau, David Ebony, Jana Prikryl, Gary Lucidon, Arne Svenson, and Michael Rubiner. It will be available at Pierogi and at artbook.com on November 1st. Hardbound, 224 pages, French folded pages with four foldout posters, edition of 1,000.
Elliott Green was born in Detroit, Michigan. He moved to New York City as a young man and lived there for twenty-four years. In 2005 he moved to Athens, New York, a small town situated between the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River where he continues to work and live. He has received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, the Rome Prize, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, along with numerous residency grants.