Elizabeth Glaessner “All this happened, more or less”

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poster for Elizabeth Glaessner “All this happened, more or less”

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Glaessner’s paintings take elements from traditional history painting and re-contextualize them in a distinctly intimate and otherworldly voice. An exploration of memory, personal history and ritual, Glaessner’s work questions the way in which we relate to and envision our past. Her most recent paintings depict a highly detailed mythology of post-human existence on earth that features anthropomorphic, gelatinous figures in familiar, yet toxic, landscapes. These organic creatures appear as if born from natural forms, like tree trunks and rock formations, in attempt to reconstruct lost histories through the detritus left behind.
Using pure pigments dispersed with water, acrylics and oils, Glaessner creates a beautifully saturated and intricately layered world through various painting techniques that recall the materiality of works by Marlene Dumas and Dana Schutz. The rich media creates illusory qualities that accentuate the amorphous nature of her subjects and their surroundings.
Glaessner combines familiar objects with misunderstood and idiosyncratic portraits, often laden with humor that counterpoint her macabre imagery. Like the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and El Greco, the forms and figures of Glaessner’s world blend together in an attempt to display a malleable reality. The paintings contain serial imagery of animals and objects considered to be sacred in her post-human world—trees, water, donkeys, boats, and treehouses. Landscapes with mountain peaks, boulders and beaches are shown melding with their inhabitants in fascinating ways, creating an uncanny image of something the viewer recognizes but cannot place.

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Schedule

from July 09, 2014 to August 15, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-07-09 from 18:00 to 20:00

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