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Lori Ellison
December 11, 2015 - January 31, 2016



Lori Ellison was born on October 5, 1958 in Montgomery, AL and raised in the Washington, DC area. She received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 1981 and was awarded a residency at Maine's Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1993. She received her MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA, in 1996. She moved to New York City the same year, where she resided in Williamsburg and became part of the burgeoning artistic community there. Commencing with the 1998 Artists Space group exhibition, Abstraction in Process II, Ellison showed her work regularly in group and solo exhibitions in galleries and museums, primarily in New York but nationally as well. Ellison's work has been reviewed extensively, including multiple reviews in The New York Times as well as many other publications, including New York Magazine, Art in America, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, d'Art International, The New Criterion, Artcritical, Bomb Magazine, and Art on Paper. Her works on paper are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Middlebury College Museum of Art, Vermont. Ellison was also a poet and writer of aphorisms, and was at the center of an expansive and supportive artistic community on Facebook numbering in the thousands. Currently her work is included in the exhibition, Powerful Babies: Keith Haring's Impact on Artists Today at the Spritmuseum in Stockholm, and her drawings will be featured in Trent Morse's forthcoming book, Ballpointists, to be published later in 2016. Ellison was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011; she passed away on August 1, 2015 at the age of 56.
 
This exhibition is the gallery's third solo showing of Ellison's work. It is comprised of more than a dozen small-scaled gouache on panel paintings, and over twenty ink or pencil on notebook paper drawings, all executed within the last eighteen months of her life. Also included are a group of small paintings in acrylic from 2011.
 
Ellison’s paintings and drawings are characterized by dense, pattern-filled compositions executed with a devotional intensity. The work incorporates both abstract geometric motifs and those drawn from nature. Organic motifs found in some of the works were inspired by Ellison's visits to the recent Matisse exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. She wrote the following about her work in 2010: "To work with humility, one must acquire some of the practical virtues artists need: diligence, temperance, modesty, bravery, ardor, devotion and economy....Proportion based on the lyric, not the epic - that is where the juice lives. Stirred, not shaken. Duchamp once said that art is the electricity that goes between the metal pole of the work of art and the viewer, and I don't need shock treatment. Art that is the size and resonance of a haiku, quiet and solid as the ground beneath one's feet....A discreet art, valiantly purified of the whole hotchpotch of artist's tricks and tics...That, that is what I am looking for."
 
  Lori Ellison, LE10271
Untitled, 2014-15
Gouache on wood panel
11 x 8 1/2 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10276
Untitled, 2014-15
Gouache on wood panel
14 x 11 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10274
Untitled, 2015
Gouache on wood panel
14 x 11 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10265
Untitled, 2014-15
Gouache on wood panel
11 x 8 1/2 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10269
Untitled, 2014-15
Gouache on wood panel
11 x 8 1/2 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10267
Untitled, 2014-15
Gouache on wood panel
11 x 8 1/2 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10270
Untitled, 2014-15
Gouache on wood panel
11 x 8 1/2 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10266
Untitled, 2014-15
Gouache on wood panel
11 x 8 1/2 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10268
Untitled, 2014-15
Gouache on wood panel
11 x 8 1/2 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10273
Untitled, 2014-15
Gouache on wood panel
11 x 8 1/2 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10272
Untitled, 2014-15
Gouache on wood panel
11 x 8 1/2 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10263
Untitled, 2014-15
Gouache on wood panel
8 x 6 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10264
Untitled, 2014-15
Gouache on wood panel
8 x 6 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10232
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on wood panel
7 x 5 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10231
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on wood panel
7 x 5 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10235
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on wood panel
7 x 5 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10230
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on wood panel
7 x 5 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10229
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on wood panel
7 x 5 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10228
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on wood panel
7 x 5 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10233
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on wood panel
7 x 5 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10236
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on wood panel
7 x 5 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10234
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on wood panel
7 x 5 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10237
Untitled, 2011
Acrylic on wood panel
7 x 5 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10282
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
11 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10284
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10285
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10287
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink and pencil
on notebook paper
11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10288
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10305
Untitled, 2014-15
Pencil on notebook paper
11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10297
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
11 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10309
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10294
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
10 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10295
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10286
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10293
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
11 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10296
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10302
Untitled, 2014-15
Pencil on notebook paper
11 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10298
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
10 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10304
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
11 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10283
A Dance to Spring, 2014
Ink on notebook paper
11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10307
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
11 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10301
Untitled, 2014-15
Pencil on notebook paper
11 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10291
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
10 7/8 x 8 1/4 inches
Lori Ellison, LE10303
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
10 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches
  Lori Ellison, LE10289
Untitled, 2014-15
Ink on notebook paper
10 7/8 x 8 1/4 inches
  Lori Ellison, installation 1
Installation view
Lori Ellison, installation 2
Installation view
Lori Ellison, installation 3
Installation view
  Lori Ellison, installation 4
Installation view
Lori Ellison, installation 5
Installation view
Lori Ellison, installation 6
Installation view
  Lori Ellison, installation 7
Installation view
Lori Ellison, installation 8
Installation view
Lori Ellison, installation 9
Installation view
  Lori Ellison, installation 10
Installation view
Lori Ellison, installation 11
Installation view
Lori Ellison, installation 12
Installation view
  Lori Ellison, installation 13
Installation view
Lori Ellison, installation 14
Installation view
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