Elisheva Biernoff: Elsewhere

Working with meticulous fidelity and care, Elisheva Biernoff uses fine, luminous brushstrokes to create intricately painted depictions of anonymous photographs, which she sources from antique stores and online marketplaces. She paints on paper-thin plywood, replicating each detail and blemish, front and back, from the original object in a methodical process that is deeply deliberate and reflective; the artist only produces around four works each year.

Individually mounted on handmade poplar stands, the resultant images are activated by the viewer’s close looking and emotional connection, yet they are also imbued with an inexorable sense of distance—a longing for another place, face, or moment in one’s life.

Biernoff’s work was the subject of the recent solo exhibition Reservoirs of Time at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, and the two-person exhibition Lost and Found: Elisheva Biernoff and Floris Schönfeld at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, California. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and more.

The artist’s work is held in permanent collections worldwide, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, and the Hammer Museum, among others.

Also on view will be examples from Biernoff’s recent body of large-format multimedia compositions that explore the rich historical tradition of the trompe l’oeil. Inspired by vintage paint-by-number sets, the multipart Road Not Taken (2024) comprises nine sculptural paintings of bucolic open roads that are based on photographs shot by the artist and her friends and family. 
 
While nodding to the pleasant, nostalgic aesthetic and commercial kitsch of the scenes found in these do-it-yourself paintings, the work also draws a parallel between the democratization of imagemaking proffered by both these craft kits and the medium of home photography.

Other works in the show take the form of delicately painted assemblages, such as Fragment (2024), in which a painted postcard of a twelfth-century stone carving is affixed to a faux wood panel using a handmade ceramic pushpin; the artist includes faded rectangles in her painted rendition of the wood surface, suggesting the existence of other images that are lost yet might one day be rediscovered.

Exploring the slippage that occurs between the experience of reality and the memories that remain after the fact, Biernoff’s poignant and visually captivating paintings serve as, in the artist’s words, “reservoirs of time.”