NYAB Event - Ellen Lanyon "Curiosities"

Ellen Lanyon "Curiosities"

Pavel Zoubok Gallery

This event has ended.

PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY presents an exhibition of new paintings by ELLEN LANYON, accompanied by a Wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities) of nineteenth and twentieth century objects that directly inspire her work.

An icon of the Chicago school for over sixty years, ELLEN LANYON continues to push the limits of her painterly imagination in a series of whimsical montages that transpose objects from her evolving collection of curiosities into surreal compositions that reverberate with the poetry and pleasure of memory. Lanyon’s painting style harkens back to her first employment as a teenage intern in the drafting room of a small Chicago foundry. She was trained to use an exacting realism to illustrate the workings of machine parts for the industry, employing precise observation and a strict attention to detail that have filtered down through decades of her work. Lanyon combines her realist painting style with “treasures” from her collection, breathing life into inanimate objects and imbuing them with distinct personalities. For instance, a small majolica humidor in the shape of a frog smoking a pipe that first belonged to her Grandfather appears in many of her canvases.

The visual and metaphorical transformation and juxtaposition of these objects are the focus of Lanyon’s new works, each painting reflecting a distinct mood and thematic focus. Lanyon writes: “Collecting became my passion, the result being a studio/dwelling full of objects: humidors and pipes, taxidermy, a toad quartet, porcelain cockatoos, Chinese puppets and all manner of odd items. Books, vintage photographs, engravings of the French illustrator Poyet as well as a plethora of ephemera complete the inventory. Their persistent presence mentors my pictorial approach and, while the compositional direction may alter, the basic message remains.”

ELLEN LANYON is a native of Chicago, trained at The School of the Art Institute, the University of Iowa and The

Courtauld Institute, University of London. Lanyon has had over seventy-five solo exhibitions and three major traveling retrospectives. She has participated in numerous national and international invitational exhibitions. Her work is in the collections of The Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art both of Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Museum of American Art, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Walker Art Center, The Milwaukee Museum of Art and The Wadsworth Atheneum among others. Honors include a Cassandra Grant, a Fulbright Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Grants, Yaddo Fellowships, The Logan Prize from The Art Institute of Chicago, election to The National Academy of Design, The University of Iowa Alumni Fellow Award, an Honorary Doctorate from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award. This is her first exhibition with Pavel Zoubok Gallery.

[Image: Ellen Lanyon "Fisch" (2009) Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 36 in.]