NADA Miami 2024: Eleanor Conover

Abattoir is pleased to present a solo booth of new paintings by Eleanor Conover at NADA Miami 2024, whose work engages with the physical and material conditions of painting as a metaphor for environmental time and space. She is an abstract painter using a particular structure of her own making—an irregular convex wooden stretcher--that allows her to explore the territory between rectangular and shaped surfaces. In addition to the shaped boundary, the paintings are often convex, bowing outwards off the wall, as aspects of elliptical and tangential perception further underscore the irregular periphery of each painting’s support. Using dyes, bleach, oil paint and other print and graphic techniques, she builds compositions which blossom into unconventional landscapes, new territories both bodily and topographic at once. The works are perennially active; while the shaped canvas puffs outwards, Conover builds a painterly language of adjacencies for the stretcher around which marks and forms swirl, in some instances covering, fading into, or engulfing that crucial form. What results are paintings that appear to fill the wall as living, breathing entities.

Having recently relocated to Maine, Conover has brought a new physicality to her paintings, generated by the immediacy of the rural landscape. The planar surface of the painting at times contains sewn pockets cradling stones from quarries, adding breadth, depth and weight to the canvas support. As such, the painting conveys its archeology indoors, creating alternate readings of the granite sourced in the land. While she is attuned to historical painting languages of Helen Frankenthaler, Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe–for Conover they represent a bridge onto a perceptual continuum. Conceived in the spirit of environmental land artists of previous generations, especially Richard Long. these works seem to ask, ‘what imprint do we make and do we leave?’

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 past exhibitions include White Columns, NY, Abattoir, Cleveland, OH; 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 engaged in research of geologic histories in Philadelphia, PA and visual work regarding ecology in coastal places as remote as the Aleutian Islands, AK.