Skip to main content

Biography

Elliott Green was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960. He moved to New York City in 1981 and lived there for twenty-four years. In 2005 he moved to Athens, New York, a small town situated between the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River, where he continues to work and live. He has received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, the Rome Prize, and three prizes and awards from the Academy of Arts and Letters, along with numerous residency grants. A book of his paintings, Elliott Green: At the Far Edge of the Known World, with essays by six writers, was published by Pierogi Gallery NYC in late 2019.

The media theorist’s story of so-called remediation is a familiar one. Each new medium is metabolized by the next—painting by photography, photography by film, film by television, all of it by the internet—and in turn, older media are reshaped in the mold of the new. But how does painting respond to photography? Television? The internet?

Elliott Green’s abstractions, smeared with shale-like layers of paint, offer a dizzying response: paintings that remediate computer graphics that remediates painting. Countless artists quote liberally from digital screens—for instance, Jack Whitten renders the home screen of an iPad as a painted abstraction in Apps for Obama, 2011—but Green, quite differently, appears to swallow the sponge, smudge, and brush tools of Photoshop, and then reconfigure them to make a real painting, the kind you can touch but are still tempted to click.

Green’s paintings mostly evoke landscapes: foaming waters, horizons blurred by fog, and ashen mountains of a rugged Brueghelian sort. There are also intestinal paths of squamous terrain that bend to the sky, warping the perspective. Comparisons could be stretched to the scraped and streaked abstractions of Gerhard Richter or Whitten, or to the intensely magnified surveillance photographs of Trevor Paglen, but Green’s paintings are distinctive. Packing medium inside of medium, painting inside of Photoshop inside of painting (an effect that holds up best when viewed at a distance), these works resonate as utterly contemporary. Each passage of Green’s brushwork smirks like a nesting doll.

Zachary FineARTFORUM

What Green does is make paintings that seize the imagination. We think we are looking at a landscape, but we cannot delineate everything in it and in the end we do not care. Instead of being disappointed, this inability becomes a deep, abiding pleasure. From ravishing entanglements of foreground, middle ground, and background to discrete forms interrupting a vista with a contrasting amalgam of geology and weather, it is obvious that Green knows how to remake the conventions associated with landscape. We do not look at these paintings: we succumb to them. Their real allure is that Green never tries to fool us: he approaches resemblance but never forgets that he is using paint.

Green has channeled the landscape paintings of the early Northern Song dynasty — when painters took to the mountains to escape the turmoil of a political order uneasily shifting from aristocracy to bureaucracy — along with the fantastical landscapes of the Sienese painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti. And if he has traveled across a thousand years to two very different cultures — which I am convinced he has — his paintings do not strike me as the least bit nostalgic: he is not romanticizing the past, but has found a way to be in tune with a rapidly disappearing realm, that of nature not despoiled by humankind.

The sense of continual motion connects Green to Vincent van Gogh, which, if you think about, is pretty amazing, especially since he does not replicate the Dutchman’s well-known repertoire of abstract marks. Another important difference is that van Gogh was methodical, while Green — a thoroughly American painter — is improvisational. He does not make a painting so much as find it in the process of layering (and removing) manifold forms, furls, and striations of luscious color. We do not see the sun in Green’s skies, but light radiates throughout.

John YauHYPERALLERGIC

Mr. Green unveils the tumultuous baroque landscapes that have evolved from the painterly cartoon figures that once inhabited his canvases. They are full of geological action and meteorological exuberance. Mountains jut, glaciers pour into the sea, tectonic plates collide, hills roll, lava burns. (Above, “Human Nature,” an oil-on-linen painting from this year.) And throughout, all kinds of brushes and tools enable an entire palette’s worth of colors to flow, stutter, twist, suffuse and fold, while freehand additions à la de Kooning — and Mr. Green’s earlier work, as well — occasionally flit about. Painters of the American West like Thomas Moran are updated. Extreme artifice prevails with photography and animation lurking just offstage. And the subterranean subtext rears its ugly head: human nature’s ignorant abuse of nature nature.

Roberta SmithNEW YORK TIMES

«Elliott Green’s paintings appear to be in continuous motion, the way animals, plants, and ultimately rocks and mountains are in continuous motion, even when our human vision fails to apprehend it. Placing great thick gestures of paint amid minute intricacies and vice versa, his compositions demonstrate the movement of the universe on both the macro and the micro scales. They might seem analogous to the huge, all-but-abstract photographs of Andreas Gursky or Edward Burtynsky (whose high-resolution digital work similarly presents the eye with sights it can’t otherwise see), but Green’s paintings are first and last human documents, their rhythms legible to the pulse and not above trying to accelerate it. »

A painting like Green’s Expander—which seems to me a bold series of formal departures, suggesting the unceasing incursions of time’s fourth dimension into what we know as the first three and thereby straining an identity’s need for coherence, while refusing such readings in just the polyvalent way that, say, Emily Dickinson’s “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - ” resists paraphrase—a painting like Expander operates like an expander on the mind, inserting thoughts (see my foregoing m-dashes) while earlier thoughts are still forming. The result is that Expander is a genuinely moving experience. Some durable alloy of gentleness and power emanates from it; the encounter in the top half between the strip of grey-to-silver and the conical form of pale aquamarine generates its own weather, as if a front of low pressure had rolled in and precipitation resulted between viewer and canvas. That a painting so meticulously made should prove so emotional is a paradox that sustains all of Green’s work.

Jana PrikrylTHE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

Elliott Green’s recent paintings of infinite landscapes—or rather, mindscapes—was as visually stunning as it was intellectually rewarding. Characteristic of the new work, the large painting Mammatus shows what appears to be a vast mountain range, like the high Himalayas, with snowy peaks visible in the far distance, and icy rivers in the foreground.

Rather than depicting any real mountains, however, Green’s rocky vista seems emblematic of anything insurmountable or unapproachable. A surrealist touch in the painting, in terms of technique as well a imagery, corresponds to certain works by Max Ernst. In Green’s composition, a large, rainbow-colored horizontal band in the upper left, like a single bravura brushstroke, is a purely abstract device that breaks the illusion of the infinite landscape, reminding the viewer that this, after all, is just paint-on-canvas. It also underscores the fact that while the visual sensation of the painting may be appreciated by all viewers, the mental and physical challenges of its creation were the artist’s alone.

David EbonyTop Ten New York Gallery Shows of 2016 in ARTNET News

What’s unique about Green’s paintings is how they merge views of the external world with the internal world, as if simulating the artist’s psyche: landscape as free-association; topology rendered through id.

But while their form may at first appear untrammeled, Green, an auto-didact who has been painting for decades, has an innate sense of composition. It might take the viewer’s eye a minute to adjust to the unexpected juxtaposition of various not-unfamiliar shapes. But each of these unsettling environments is a balancing act: the deft juggling of elements that emulate recognizable shapes in nature, reconfigured to create something totally new, but nonetheless holistic.

Phoebe HobanRIOT MATERIAL

Bibliography

Exhibition catalog, Elliott Green, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York. Essay by Phoebe Hoban July 2024 [View Catalog]
Exhibition catalog, Elliott Green, Ascension Pamela Salisbury Gallery, New York. Essay by Chris Rush April 2023 [View Catalog]
Galerie Magazine No.26, Summer 2022
Yau, John, Hyperallergic. April 2022
Exhibition catalog, Elliott Green, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York. Essay by Wayne Koestenbaum March 2022 [View Catalog]
Exhibition catalog, Elliott Green, AutoRevisionism Pamela Salisbury Gallery, New York. Essay by Elliott Green March 2021 [View PDF]
Yau, John, Hyperallergic. June 2020
Harper’s Magazine
. May 2019.
Fine, Zachary. Artforum. January 2019.
McQuaid, Cate. At Concord Art, spaces tell stories. Boston Globe. November 02, 2017.
Litmanen, Pirita. REVS magazine No. 18, Spring/Summer, 2017
Smith, Roberta. Art and Museums: Elliott Green’s “Human Nature” at Pierogi, New York Times. March 16, 2017
Malone, Peter. ART REVIEW: Elliott Green Paintings Marry Landscapes to Dramatic Abstraction, Hamptons Art Hub, March 6, 2017
Hoban, Phoebe. From Shangri-La to Hell: Elliott Green’s Human Nature, RIOT MATERIAL, March 4, 2017
Yau, John. Elliot Green Can See for Miles and Miles and Miles, Hyperallergic, February 26, 2017
Prikryl, Jana. The Painter of Continuous Motion, The New York Review of Books, February 18, 2017
Exhibition catalog, Human Nature, Pierogi, New York. Essay by Jana Prikryl. February 2017 [View PDF]
Caldwell, Luisa; Freedman, Matt. In retrospect: Post-truth with David Brody and Elliot Green, Two Coats of Paint, February 6, 2017
Ebony, David. Top 10 New York Gallery Shows of 2016, ArtNet News, December 24, 2016
Yau, John. Why Give a Name to It?, Hyperallergic, December 18, 2016
Yau, John. Summer Carousing and Revelry, Hyperallergic, July 3, 2016
Ayers, Robert. “Elliott Green: D’Amelio Terras” (pdf), ArtNews, December 2009, p. 110
Maine, Stephen. “Joanne Greenbaum and Elliott Green”, Art in America, November 2009, p. 194
Brody, David. “Elliott Green: Personified Abstraction at D’Amelio Terras”, artcritical.com, October 2009
Neyenesch, Cassandra. “Joanne Greenbaum: Hollywood Squares, Elliott Green: Personified Abstraction”, The Brooklyn Rail, October 2009
Worth, Alexi. “Elliott Green’s Family Values”, + 8 reproductions; The Sienese Shredder #3, 2009
Hunt, Helen (Director). Then She Found Me (film), paintings featured, April 2008
Wolff, Rebecca (Editor). Magazine cover and nine reproductions, Fence, Vol. 9, No. 2, Winter/Spring 2007
Ebony, David. “Working Proof: Elliott Green”, Art on Paper, September-October 2001
Exhibition catalog, The Figure: Another Side of Modernism, January 2001
Ebony, David. “Elliott Green”, Art in America, February 2001
Readings: Elliott Green, 6 reproductions, Harper’s, November 2000
Smith, Lee. “Once Upon a Canvas: The Elliott Green Story”, Modern Painters, Autumn 2000
McAdam, Barbara. “Elliott Green”, ArtNews, September 2000
Johnson, Ken. Objects of Desire: 125 Views of the Human Figure, The New York Times, September 1, 2000
Goings On About Town, “Elliott Green/Steve Mumford” The New Yorker, June 5, 2000
Johnson, Ken. “Art in Review; Elliott Green”, The New York Times, May 26, 2000
Goings On About Town, “Elliott Green”, (reproduction) The New Yorker, May 15, 2000
“Cyberdrawings”, Art On Paper, January 15, 2000
Catalog, 26 American Artists, Campo & Campo, Belgium, October 1999
Wolff, Rebecca (Editor). “Gravity & Float”, magazine cover and seven reproductions; Fence, Spring 1998
H-O, Paul. “Elliott Green: Gravity & Float”, artnet.com, February, 1998
Shulz, David. “Editor’s Choice”, Bomb, Spring 1998
Artist project, Interview, February 1998
Goings On About Town, “Elliott Green” The New Yorker, February 9, 1998
Robinson, Walter; H-O, Paul. Gallery Beat (television), January 1998
Levin, Kim. “Voice Choices”, The Village Voice, January 27, 1998
Contemporary Art Series #8, Elliott Green (exhibition catalog), Krannert Museum, April 1996
Persistence of Pagan Myth in Modern ImaginationThe New York Times, December 29, 1995
MacAdam, Barbara. “Elliott Green: Fawbush Gallery”, ArtNews, February 1995
New Observations (New York), No. 105. March-April 1995
Ostrow, Saul. Bomb, Fall 1995
Sillman, Amy. “Drawings: Surrealism & the Current Vernacular”, Zingmagazine, Autumn 1995
“Desire”, Visionaire, Number 12, Fall 1994
Schaffner, Ingrid. “Cursive”, The Parkett Series with Contemporary Artists, No. 42, 1994
Upshaw, Reagan. “Elliott Green: Fawbush Gallery”, Art in America, No. 12, December 1993
Schaffner, Ingrid. Return of the Cadavre Exquis [exhibition catalog], The Drawing Center, New York, November 1993
King, Elaine. The Figure as Fiction [catalog], The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, November 1993
Kimmelman, Michael. “Fever: Exit Art” The New York Times, December 18, 1992
Humphrey, David. “Elliott Green: Hirschl and Adler Modern”, Art Issues, Sept/Oct, No. 19, 1991
Handy, Ellen. “Elliott Green: Hirschl and Adler Modern”, Arts, October 1991
Baker, Kenneth. “Galleries: A Promising Quartet of Painters”, San Francisco Chronicle, May 10, 1990
Adams, Brooks. “Preview”, Interview, September 1989

RECEIVE SHOW ANNOUNCEMENTS