Independent 2026: Eleanor Conover

Abattoir Gallery is pleased to present a solo presentation of new works by Eleanor Conover at Independent 2026, booth 415. The fair opens with a preview on Thursday, May 14, and continues through Sunday, May 17. This marks the artist’s first solo presentation in New York and precedes her first museum exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, opening January 2027. 

Conover’s practice centers on abstract, shaped canvas paintings heavily informed by materiality and experience. Her self-reflexive works often employ bowed stretchers—which the artist hand-constructs using woodworking tools to carve precisely beveled edges—creating convex, protruding canvases that obfuscate image and sculpture. 

Rooted in process, Conover looks to unlearn conventions of painting and contribute to the language of abstraction through the corporeal act of painting. Integrating handmade and craft traditions, her approach is meticulous and physical, exploring the primacy of her materials through hewn stretcher bars, stitched pockets and punctures, arduously dyed linen, and layered paint. Each step reflects a deep engagement with substratum, translating tactility and configuration into dimensional forms that echo the lines and structures of nature.

Beyond the rigor of making, Conover’s dialectical work engages with conceptual lineages from art history, including 1970s feminist art—particularly its reclamation of craft, surface, and production—and American Abstraction, calling to mind the process-based work of Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, and Amy Sillman. In a subtle nod to land art, she often affixes or sews materials sourced from anthropogenic landscapes, such as marble slabs from quarries, directly onto her canvases, emphasizing discarded and raw materials as carriers of geographic and cultural meaning. These materials function as metaphors for ever-evolving environmental conditions, shaped first by geological history and then by human activity. Conversing with these historical aesthetic languages, her work combines process-based abstraction with more perceptual approaches to space, creating a singular vision that is rich with references yet uniquely her own.

While grounded in painting, the artist also cites the deconstructive qualities of avant-garde poetry as a foundation of her practice. Her approach draws from writers such as Susan Howe, whose fragmented treatment of language—often incorporating upside-down verse, crossed-out words, and overlapping text—uses the page as a physical space to shape meaning. Similarly, Conover’s visual language is guided by reorientation, with varied supports converting the rectangular canvas into a malleable object. Her practice involves configuring each new shape according to a set of formal demands, insisting on continual invention and an openness to the successive painting. This attentiveness to material reveals the imprints of process, and allows viewers to construct their own interpretations rather than passively consume a pre-determined narrative.

By rethinking the canvas as a structural form and foregrounding the act of making, Conover embeds authorship into the framework of her practice, arriving at an expression that is both an objective embodiment and an individual experience. 

Eleanor Conover was born in Hartford, CT in 1988. She earned an MFA at Tyler School of Art, Temple University (2018) and a BA from Harvard College (2010). She received a post- MFA teaching fellowship at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and currently resides in Maine where she is Assistant Professor of Art at Bowdoin College. Recent exhibitions include Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, OH; Halsey McKay, East Hampton, NY; Praise Shadows, Boston, MA; White Columns, New York, NY; Hudson House, Hudson, NY; Bad Water, Knoxville, TN; and Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY. She was the 2022 Donald J. Gordon visiting artist at Swarthmore College and was the 2020-21 recipient of the Wellesley College Alice C. Cole ’42 fellowship. Her practice has also been supported through artist residencies including The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, Cow House Studios, and the Joseph A. Fiore Art Center. With an interest in land and the environment, she has additionally engaged in the research of geologic histories in Philadelphia, PA and visual work regarding ecology in coastal places as remote as the Aleutian Islands, AK.

Abattoir Gallery is a space for contemporary art in Cleveland, Ohio. It presents a program of local, regional, and national artists, designed to elicit thought-provoking conversation and discussion.