McKenzie Fine Art: Lori Ellison Exhibition 2015-16

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467 fax 212 989 5642

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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."