Jeff Elrod “This Brutal World”

Luhring Augustine Gallery

[Image: Jeff Elrod "Rubber-Miro" (2015) Acrylic and UV ink on canvas, 84 x 69 in.]

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Luhring Augustine presents This Brutal World, concurrent exhibitions of new paintings by Jeff Elrod in our Chelsea and Bushwick galleries.

Elrod’s practice is rooted in the tradition of American twentieth-century abstract painting. He began painting abstractions inspired by supergraphics and video game imagery in the early 1990s. In 1996, he began to use the computer - specifically a mouse - to facilitate paintings through a technique he calls “frictionless drawing”. Using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, he creates digital drawings that he then renders on canvas by hand with tape and acrylic paint. His paintings are also often made by printing reworked digitized imagery directly onto canvas via inkjet printer. He has recently experimented with shaped canvases as well, using these same techniques of printing and hand painting on these unique forms. Throughout his work, Elrod aims to depict a kind of “screen space” in order to examine the dichotomy between traditional painterly space and the virtual space of the computer.

The exhibition in Chelsea will present new paintings that explore the range of Elrod’s digital and analog processes. The Bushwick exhibition will focus on a series of new “blur” paintings. The inspiration for the “blur” paintings comes from the “Dream Machine”, a device created by artist and poet Brion Gysin and scientist Ian Sommerville in 1959. Their machine uses oscillating light frequencies to stimulate the optical nerves while the viewer’s eyes are closed. Elrod evokes the hallucinatory retinal effects of the “Dream Machine” by processing his original drawings into blurred images to create overall fields of colored soft cloud-like forms that resist focus.

Jeff Elrod was born in Dallas, TX. Important museum exhibitions of his work include Jeff Elrod: Nobody Sees Like Us at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York in 2013 and FOCUS: Jeff Elrod at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2009. His paintings are included in many prominent public and private collections including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; 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 is a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany award as well as the Claire Hart De Goyer Award given by the Dallas Museum of Art. He lives and works in Marfa, TX and New York, NY.