NYAB Event - Ellen de Meijer “Digital Divide”

Ellen de Meijer “Digital Divide”

Unix Gallery

[Image: Ellen de Meijer "BackUp" (2014) Oil on Canvas, 59 x 35 in.]

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Ellen de Meijer’s first New York solo show, Digital Divide, will be on view at UNIX Gallery New York

In Digital Divide, Ellen de Meijer’s works express a ruminative perspective from what you don’t see to what you feel everyday. De Meijer intends to capture the impact of our postmodern society on human behavior and the conflict between our basic human instincts of love, greed, fear, and community and our constant desire to progress and succeed.

“Digital Divide is about all of us. The last 20 years we have experienced an enormous evolution, mainly driven by technology and the digital revolution. But our human instincts have not changed despite that our modern society often expects us to ignore them. It’s this tension that inspires my work,” says de Meijer.

Ellen de Meijer’s paintings tend to give the viewer a unique feeling of sympathetic tension and pathos, simultaneously. Her paintings portray people that are well-dressed and seemingly successful, yet vulnerable, with an empty gaze. De Meijer’s figures are armed with digital gadgets such as Google Glass or iPhones, which refer to our zeitgeist of access to information and power. This proliferation of technology becomes a point of dependency while our human instincts docilely move to the background. Often they are portrayed holding small, bizarre objects or wearing rubber cleaning gloves that are symbolic of a societal obsession with sterilization and unattainable perfection.

Ellen de Meijer (b. 1955) is known for her fine technique and level of detail in her work. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Tilburg (the Netherlands.) Her works are included in public and private collections, such as the Dutch Art Collection of the Van den Broek Foundation, and others.