Press Release
Sharon Ellis
Paintings January 6 - February 19, 2011Catalogue available
Greenberg Van Doren Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of six paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Ellis. This will be Ellis’ second solo exhibition both with the gallery and in New York City, and will be on view from January 6th to February 19th, 2011. A fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Catherine Morris was published on the occasion of the show.
Ellis’ evocative approach to landscape painting showcases a vibrant energy pulsing through the natural world. By pictorially manipulating natural environs, Ellis’ paintings touch upon the sublimity of the wild with rich hues, dramatic light sources and marked proportions. Catherine Morris, Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, writes insightfully as follows:
“The mirrored surfaces of Ellis’s canvases speak to the artist’s love of painting through the showmanship of removing all traces of the hand. Reminiscence, a stylized depiction of the sun breaking through clouds over a field of daisies, acknowledges the seemingly impossibly clichéd relationship human beings of the twenty first century have with the landscape subject as subject. And yet this modestly scaled painting with its impossibly polished surface somehow manages to present a timely vision of both an actual landscape – because Ellis does find these images in the vicinity of her home – while also participating in an ambitious historical dialogue.”
Sharon Ellis was born in Great Lakes, Illinois in 1955 and lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Solo exhibitions include California, Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, 2006 and Evocations, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, 2002. Recent group exhibitions include Eden’s Edge: Fifteen LA Artists, The Hammer Museum, 2007, LA Post Cool, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, 2004 and Departures: Eleven Artists at the Getty, The J. Paul Getty Museum, LA, 2000.
