Elena Sisto
Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent work by Elena Sisto. This is the artist's first solo-show with the gallery.
This exhibition will serve as the final venue for the traveling museum exhibition Between Silver Light and Orange Shadow: Paintings by Elena Sisto, which originated at the Museum of Art + Design at Miami Dade College, Miami and traveled to the University Gallery at the University of Florida, Gainesville. A comprehensive full-color catalog with essays by Stephen Westfall and Amy Vigilante is available.
For the last three years, Elena Sisto's paintings have explored the formative years of young women artists. Three-quarter profiles of women against the backdrop of the studio or partially hidden behind the canvas provide a portal into the psychology of a unique cast of characters. Though certainly abstracted into cartoonish guises, Sisto's figures still maintain unique personalities and dispositions that hint at the possibility of narrative.
The most recent paintings from this year, however, show an increasingly tighter cropping of the picture plane. The resulting composition, focused on parts of the body rather than the whole, allows for greater preoccupation with design. Planes of pattern and color are distinctively animated, albeit by the pattern of polka-dots on a figure's shirt or the articulated circles of bubble wrap that secure a painting. The resulting compositions are more elusive than before, offering less of a narrative path than an opportunity for the viewer to relate to the physicality of the subject's body and the abstraction of the painting's composition.
Elena Sisto (b. 1952) lives and works in New York. She received her BA in Art and Art History from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design and studied at the New York Studio School. The artist has been included in numerous museum exhibitions including those at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Katonah Museum of Art, and the Katzen Museum of Art at American University, among others. In addition, she was included in the 43rd Biennial of Contemporary American Painting at The Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Inglis Griswold Nelson Prize from the National Academy Museum and School, and the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist's Fellowship.
Between Silver Light and Orange Shadow: Paintings by Elena Sisto will be on view from April 25 - May 25, 2013. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 25th from 6-8 pm. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 am to 6:00 pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@loribooksteinfineart.com.
