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Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present its second exhibition of new work by Elisheva Biernoff. Titled Starting from Wrong, the exhibition features twelve meticulously detailed paintings measuring no larger than 4 x 5 inches each. All completed since 2017, Biernoff’s recent paintings are carefully observed, two-sided works based on found and anonymous photographs. The exhibition will be on view from April 1 to May 28, 2021, and will be accompanied by a catalogue published by Fraenkel Gallery, to be released on April 7. Please join us on April 22 for the premiere of a conversation between the artist and Fraenkel Gallery President Frish Brandt.
The gallery is currently open by appointment. Click here to plan your visit.
Each of Biernoff’s paintings requires three to four months to complete, belying the instantaneous nature of the source material. Aptly beginning with a work titled Wrong 1966, Biernoff’s new paintings depict photographs that may be considered to have failed in a variety of ways. These “failures” include various forms of fading, sun flares, and color shifts, with elements that appear to be damaged or missing. In Him, 2018, a man in a suit is obscured by sunlight coming from behind, rendering him anonymous, and breaking photography’s classic taboo against placing a subject in front of bright light. A mysterious Polaroid verges on jarring abstraction in Instant, 2021, as dark grey patches of “damaged” emulsion appear to rend a light-dappled oceanscape.
Biernoff’s double-sided paintings are displayed on stands that allow them to be viewed from multiple perspectives. Ripple, 2020, features figures on a sandy expanse with scribbled handwriting on the verso that references the odd look of the print: “Can’t figure out why the waves unless it’s the heat? Do you have any idea?” With attention to even the most seemingly insignificant detail, Biernoff’s work conveys a sense of a photograph’s history before it arrived in her possession.
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Memory is a slippery thing, and photographs are tricksters, supplanting actual memories, or distorting, exaggerating, redirecting.
[ALL STATEMENTS BY THE ARTIST]
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I’m using that aspect of photography to play yet another trick, to draw attention to how things are not what they seem by making something that is not what it seems.
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The pictures in my recent work all have an intended subject – say, a portrait of a friend on the balcony – and then they have an unintended interruption that intrudes so completely on the picture that it becomes a subject in its own right.
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You can’t look at a double exposure of a lawn party without seeing the double exposure first and foremost – the mistakes are loud, and assert themselves.
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In the paintings, mischance becomes the subject. There’s something absurd and obstinate about laboring to perfectly replicate a mistake, and that gives the paintings a charge that the photographs don’t have.
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[TEXT/VERSO]
This + the next one are of Bill + Earl on a sand dune.
Can’t figure out why the waves unless it’s the heat?
Do [sic] have any idea?
WHITE SANDS
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The paintings are reservoirs of time and concentration, where everything is made on purpose. They are slow and quiet and made over many months.
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They have to be this way - small and concentrated – in order to get under the skin a little, to disorient a little, to ask that you look closer, and look again, like I do.
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For any questions, please contact inquiries@fraenkelgallery.com or click below:
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Diane Arbus in Automat at Sixth Avenue in New York, c. 1968 by Roz Kelly.
Diane Arbus (1923–1971) is one of the most original and influential photographers of the twentieth century. She studied photography with Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch, and Lisette Model and had her first published photographs appear in Esquire in 1960. In 1963 and 1966 she was awarded John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships and was one of three photographers whose work was the focus of New Documents, John Szarkowski’s landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1967. Arbus’s depictions of couples, children, female impersonators, nudists, New York City pedestrians, suburban families, circus performers, and celebrities, among others, span the breadth of the postwar American social sphere and constitute a diverse and singularly compelling portrait of humanity.
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The gallery is currently open by appointment. Click here to plan your visit.
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FURTHER READING
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ELISHEVA BIERNOFF: STARTING FROM WRONG
FRAENKEL GALLERY 2020Elisheva Biernoff: Starting from Wrong, the second monograph dedicated to the artist’s work, features all fifteen paintings the artist has completed since 2017 reproduced to exact scale recto and verso.
LINK TO PUBLICATION -
ELISHEVA BIERNOFF
FRAENKEL GALLERY 2017This book is the first monograph devoted to the artist’s work. The catalogue reproduces 14 of Biernoff’s paintings of photographs at actual scale (about 4 x 4 inches each) and in extraordinary detail.
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"EXPOSURE" PAINTING PROCESS
FRAENKEL GALLERY 2017On the ocassion of Elisheva Biernoff's first solo exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery from May 11 – July 8, 2017, the artist discussed the painting process of Exposure, 2017.
LINK TO VIDEO
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ELISHEVA BIERNOFF: Starting From Wrong
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