NYAB Event - Elena Sisto “Afternoons”

Elena Sisto “Afternoons”

Lori Bookstein Fine Art

This event has ended.

Lori Bookstein Fine Art announces an exhibition of recent work by Elena Sisto. This is the artist’s second solo show with the gallery. An illustrated essay by Robert Storr is available.

For this exhibition, Sisto will present a series of new paintings that focus on the artist’s studio and herself. Several works depict iterations of the artist’s own tightly-cropped reflection in a mirror in which she is either answering the telephone, taking a bite of salad or washing her hands. Seemingly captured at some interstitial moment, these paintings attest to the domestic “realities” of studio life. Often times, the bevel of the glass or the frame of the mirror highlight the fact that this is a painting of a reflection and thus the viewer is twice removed from the subject depicted. Indeed, Storr writes of the series: “The compositions of these incomplete self-portraits are jig-saw puzzle tight even as the poses suggest a near loss of control over the items she clutches. That said Sisto never loses control over the strokes that describe these dense amalgams of body parts and objects. Indeed her relaxed command of every mark, whether broad or relatively precise but always painterly, is a principal source of the pleasures provided us.”

In other paintings, the artist so closely crops the compositions that there seems to be no space at all between the subject and the picture plane. In one particular painting called Etsy Sweater, a view of the artist looking down at her lap depicts hands so large they not only dwarf the tail of the dog she holds, but they seem so enormous as if to crush it. The composition in these compressed views, or “cinematic extreme close-up” as Storr refers to it, “defies expectations – of actual intimacy? of narcissistic self-betrayal? – by concealing far more than it reveals, that is by transforming the body into a mask.”