Installation photo credit: Dawn Blackman

Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce our presentation for the 2023 Armory Show, a three-person booth with new works by Ellen Berkenblit, Elizabeth Neel, and Lavaughan Jenkins. A shared spirit of experimentation and distinctive painterly language links the three artists. Their visual vocabularies defy a singular narrative in favor of a highly idiosyncratic painterly language that thrives on formal repetition and celebrates an exuberant lexicon of mark-making.

Ellen Berkenblit makes bold paintings that blend formal experimentation and a virtuoso handling of color and line with an ever-evolving pictorial calligraphy (including a woman in profile, animals and birds, abstracted flowers and plant-like shapes). Berkenblit employs an intoxicating palette ranging from dirty pinks and muted flesh tones to acid greens and vibrant blues and reds that pop against rich velvety blacks and umbers. Composed intuitively, her paintings evoke an innate physicality as Berkenblit builds the images through brushstrokes—like sub-conscious electrical surges—that dictate the composition. For the artist, the alchemical nature of paint and pigment demonstrate a synesthesia as colors evoke sounds and tastes and figures emerge as the natural expression of her painting process.

Lavaughan Jenkins’s work centers images of Black women as icons of resilience and beauty in paintings that consist of thick layers of paint applied with his fingers or a palette knife. Jenkins also references a vocabulary from across art history, including Francisco Goya and Philip Guston in his use of paint to convey emotion, depth, and symbol. In this newest body of work, a background of patterned ivory offsets his figures while focusing attention on the women he depicts. Referencing specific people in Jenkins’s life, the women–dressed in colorful attire–are often accompanied by Jenkins’s talismanic figures of protection which sit in the lower corner of the canvas.

Elizabeth Neel’s paintings on raw canvas employ greens, purples, and ochre colors that evoke both the natural world and emotive landscapes of the body. In her architecture of mark-making, splatters of color communicate with hard-edged shapes, expressing the emotional qualities of her vigorous paint application. Vertical swaths of paint anchor swirls, splatters, and smears only to drip onto the bottom of the canvas. Neel’s dexterous mark-making builds up compositions that translate her choreography of movements into specific forms. Her drips, pours, sweeping brushstrokes, and impressions onto the canvas conjure a poetic lyricism beyond her paintings.