Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to present Jello and Petit Fours – 4 exuberant gouache paintings on paper by Ellen Berkenblit. 

Last summer, Berkenblit placed an online order for 30” x 22” sheets of paper. By accident, 30” x 44” sheets arrived. The vast sheets of paper barely fit on her drawing table. Approaching with pencil or brush, standing to engage the full span of her arm, even with this richness of space, her compositions could not be contained. 

Each work on paper shows a female figure in an elaborate floral or feathered hat, face in profile, her mouth, if visible, stretched open very wide, as if screaming, her eyes equally wide. The edges of her hat and face are most often cut off by the edges of the paper; the view is cropped in, like a close-up still for a movie poster. The scale of gesture, composition, and paper are no match – these works burst at the seams with energy. There is both a claustrophobia and an expansiveness to this relationship between the composition and the edge – our view of the figure is compressed, but the gestures that compose her are broad and free.

Painted in gouache, a very delicate, technical water-soluble paint that yields rich colors with a matte surface, the tension between containment and expansion is written even into the material of the paint. In Berkenblit’s hand, this very straight-forward medium comes into a wildness not entirely inherent to its qualities. To layer color, each layer must dry fully and because the pigment is water-based, the paper can only take on so much moisture before becoming weak. There was a tension inherent in the making that informs the tension of the paintings; the patient waiting, staring, deciding how to paint and then, with control, attacking the surface with color before backing away again. 

Ellen Berkenblit (b.1958) lives and works in New York and has been presented in solo exhibitions since 1984. Recent solo exhibitions include Drawing Center, New York; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; and Anton Kern Gallery, New York. In 2014 she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is in several prominent public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.