Vielmetter Los Angeles is thrilled to announce our third solo exhibition with New York-based painter, Ellen Berkenblit, Other Shapes at Night.

Berkenblit makes pictures that are neither narrative nor representational nor truly abstract. While she uses motifs that include people, animals, plants, and objects to construct her compositions–suggesting the possibility of narrative or representational content–it is the tension between the suggestion of this content and its absence that produces an electrifying aesthetic arousal in response to the artist’s paintings. Composed intuitively, shape and color responding to and covering over what came before, Berkenblit’s paintings evoke pictures of the subconscious; snapshots of visions and ideas that arise spontaneously and are as richly felt as they are fleeting.

Throughout her career, Berkenblit has had an inexhaustible appetite for exploring the possibilities of paint. Her work is defined as much by her idiosyncratic polychromy, an always evolving palette that develops from her expertise in mixing and layering color, as it is by her unique graphic style, anchored in a calligraphic language of shapes emerging from rich and dynamic painted black grounds. In many of her new works, all painted over the last year, the palette has shifted and warmed, her usual bright colors now wrapped in a diffused, warm light, not dissimilar to the potent interaction of incandescent streetlights and high levels of humidity. The resulting body of work is dreamlike and surreal, heightening the suggestive nature of the artist’s compositions, drawing the viewer into an evocative interior space.

Ellen Berkenblit (b. 1958, New Jersey) was a 2014 Guggenheim fellow. In 2019 she was commissioned to create Leopard’s Lane, a site-specific mural for the MCA Chicago’s Atrium Project. Her works are included in the collections of several major museums including the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.  Recent solo exhibitions include the Drawing Center, New York; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels; and Anton Kern Gallery, New York. Selected recent group exhibitions include “All them Witches,” Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA; “Drawn together again,” FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; and “True Blue Mirror,” McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. She is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles and Anton Kern Gallery in New York.