Elana Bowsher

Hannah Hoffman is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Elana Bowsher. Featuring a series of paintings ranging in monumental to intimate in scale, these abstract works manifest a disciplined formal interrogation. Bowsher’s paintings embrace a legacy of abstraction where the very real is zoomed in (or out) to the point where only a sensual ideal remains. Bowsher composed these works through cropped and expanded photographs of previous paintings, which were inspired by imagery of bones, organs, fossils and x-rays. Looping patterns and compositional principles with rhythmic sensibility, Bowsher blends and layers pigments, wiping away and adding color through dry brushing and her own fingertips. Any hint of movement evokes the rushing of blood or the inhale and exhale of the lungs. 

To zoom is to refine and to focus. This impulse, akin to the categorical impulse of scientific imagery, brings Bowsher’s paintings to the realm of rebirth. The central tension of her work often comes from a transition between hard and soft. Where a line blurs, a shape dissolves, a color solidifies – metamorphosis is the governing order. The self-referential practice of zooming in on her previous paintings is a similar practice of transition, using her own process as conceptual material for the show itself. Bowsher’s starting subject has been subsumed by aesthetic urges, wrenching the plot away from our established expectations towards the mysterious. A transcendent, metaphysical quality emerges in each painting where waves of pigment caress in seductive eroticism. Bowsher conjures atmospheric environments with swathes of color as the essence of imagination. Color and shape become the protagonist, antagonist, setting, theme and driving motivation. 

A tenet throughout the show is that of duality. Binaries like hard and soft, presence and absence, internal and external, human and sublime are presented and suspended. Moments of calm, where colors fit tightly together like a puzzle piece, are balanced with transient, airy, brushstrokes. Bowsher’s ability to balance, often around a diagonal composition, represents the imperfection of the natural world while still suggesting a divine cosmic structure. The aesthetic rules throughout make the subtle dramatic, where any shift in scale, canvas shape, or orientation creates a new mood or association. The evocation of physicality is just a translation of the physicality inherent in Bowsher’s own painting process, where stillness and activity coalesce in divine reverence.