Ellen Siebers: dream song

parrasch heijnen is pleased to present dream song, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Hudson, NY-based artist Ellen Siebers (b. 1986, Madison, WI).

Using poetic washes of abstraction, Siebers memorializes the immediacy of beauty in vignettes of daily life. She envisions indistinct but familiar verses, through a duality of sensation and perception. In these gentle scenes, the simultaneity of what is felt and observed is conveyed together yet distinctly apart.

Siebers gives breath to the temporal phenomena of her subjects with fluid compositions on panel. Any distinction between sight and impression is blurred by the artist’s languid brushstrokes. Intimately scaled yet uninhibited, the works capture a quality of lightness held within a fleeting moment.

In Apples in May, 2023, a field of vision fades in and out of focus as soft boundaries gently suggest form. Using cathartic gestures, Siebers composes still life arrangements which shine with fractals of light. The Double Red Sun (2023), spawned from thick atmospheric smoke due to ongoing northern wildfires, is a direct reminder of the unconstrained interconnectedness of our environment. The view remains as an impression, with painterly preservation. 

Small windows open onto concurrent nested scenes, frequently depicting a nude figure in a moment of repose. The character acts as a placeholder, crystallizing moments, to visually superimpose oneself within introspective stills. Illuminating the sleeping figure within, a tonal field surrounds a preserved frame in Blue Sleep, 2023. The enveloping abstraction appears as a sensory landscape, echoing hues of the enclosed scene. The artist renders her figures tenderly, with a dimensionality unique to their interior realms. 

As she encounters the world, Siebers catalogues each sensation, measuring color, vibrancy, temperature and motion. This extension of present wonderment is transposed into her vulnerable scenes by a self-reflective gaze. Capturing the ephemeral atmosphere, she weaves a new mythology of beauty where her subjects are granted the gravity of their own cosmos.