Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce The Last Handshake, an exhibition of new paintings by Jeff Elrod, which will mark the artist’s third solo show with the gallery. Rooted in the tradition of twentieth-century abstraction, Elrod’s paintings employ a unique combination of computerized and analog techniques to depict a flattened “screen space.”
Elrod was among the first artists to explore robustly the pairing of digital and conventional painting, challenging the distinction between them in order to expand the language of the medium. Over the years, his working method has evolved in tandem and engaged with changes in technology. Early in his career, Elrod developed his “frictionless drawing” method, using a computer mouse to create gestural compositions in the virtual workspace before transferring them onto canvas. These “analog paintings” were first exhibited in New York twenty years ago at Pat Hearn Gallery. In such works, Elrod recreated digital renderings on canvas with the use of a projector, tape, and acrylic paint, thereby adapting and transforming the original digital drawings into the physical realm.
Presented in the exhibition at Luhring Augustine Tribeca is a new body of work in which Elrod, utilizing an ink-jet printer, transfers digital drawings in multiple layers directly onto linen in order to build up a rich, saturated painting surface. Employing traditional painterly tools and gestures, he then reworks the still-wet inkjet ink by hand, often wiping away or blurring the printed composition, and adding spray-paint and acrylic to activate the image further. Through this multifarious and hybrid working method, Elrod creates complex and nuanced works that merge the genealogy of postwar abstraction with the development of new technologies. His work addresses the ever evolving and continually renegotiated interplay between our digital and physical environments.
Jeff Elrod (b. 1966, Dallas, TX) has exhibited at numerous important institutions in the United States including MoMA PS1, New York, NY; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, FL; and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO. Paintings by the artist are in included in prominent public collections such as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Collection, Washington D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. Elrod is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (1998), and the Claire Hart De Goyer Award bestowed by the Dallas Museum of Art (1992).
