Jeff Elrod
Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by the American artist Jeff Elrod. This will be the artist’s first solo show with the gallery.
In this exhibition Elrod presents a group of large-scale abstract paintings which all come from images first made on a computer screen. In his view, the twenty-first century is characterized by our engagement with the screen, which is illusionary space. Digital images will seem to possess depth, but in reality they are compressed and read as a flat surface.
Elrod’s practice as a painter is rooted in the tradition of American twentieth-century abstract painting and is simultaneously informed by the aesthetics of the digital environment he works in; the compressed space in his paintings articulates the moment when analogue meets digital. Using programs such as Illustrator or Photoshop he draws and reworks imagery that he then renders on canvas by hand, using a projector and tape. He paints over the taped out lines using any one of a variety of techniques, including spraying and digital printing; once he arrives at a point that satisfies him, he removes the tape to reveal his line drawing. In a recent evolution in his work Elrod uses ink jet printing on canvas, with little or no manual intervention.
Born in Texas in 1966, Jeff Elrod was discovered by the late gallerist Pat Hearn, who gave him his first New York solo exhibition in her gallery in 2000. Since that time he has been living and working between New York City and Marfa, Texas, where he has lived since doing a residency at the Chinati Foundation in 1998. His work has been exhibited at galleries and museums worldwide; recent museum exhibitions include Jeff Elrod: Nobody Sees Like Us at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York in 2013 and in FOCUS: Jeff Elrod at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2009. His paintings are in many prominent public and private collections including that of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection, Washington D.C. He was the recipient of the Claire Hart De Goyer Award given by the Dallas Museum of Art in 1992 and he was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 1998. Elrod was nominated for the 2013 Rob Pruitt Art Award in two categories: Artist of the Year and Solo Show of the Year.