Marie Van Elder “Woodland”

Blue Mountain Gallery

[Image: Van Elder "Stump III" (2017) acrylics, oil on linen 15 x 15 in.]

This event has ended.

In her first solo exhibition at Blue Mountain Gallery, “Woodland”, Van Elder connects her art practice to her daily experience of walking in the northern California coastal woods, where she encounters vessel shaped stumps, post fire charred trunks, undergrowth, roots, fallen branches, moss, ferns, rocks, grasses and other wonderful, organized chaos and micro-systems.

Evocative of the human body, with traces of past trauma and life cycles, the fragility, resilience and beauty of the subject matter also remind us of our responsibility for our threatened natural surroundings and the urgency to take the time to look.

Marie Van Elder was born in Brussels, Belgium. She graduated from UCL, Belgium and received her MFA in Painting in 2003 from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Van Elder’s work has been included in exhibitions in California (San Jose ICA, Triton Museum, SFMOMA Artists Gallery, Root Division, Oakland Art Gallery, Berkeley Art Center, Ampersand, Southern Exposure, College of Marin, Dominican University, Marin MOCA, Headlands CFA, etc…), New York, Utah, Tokyo and was recently part of the Rtbf/Canvas La Collection national exhibition at Bozar in Brussels. She has also been an affiliate resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito (where she was a Tournesol Award finalist in 2007).
Her work has been featured in New American Paintings and Studio Visit magazine.