Eleanor Conover: As the Crow Flies
May 30 – July 8, 2025
Opening reception May 30, 6 – 8pm
Abattoir Gallery presents Eleanor Conover: As the Crow Flies, a solo exhibition of new paintings. Following her successful show with the gallery at NADA Miami last year, Conover has developed a series which pares down the formal elements, bringing her multilayered paintings to a refined iteration of an American abstract landscape tradition.
In the spirit of the show’s title, Conover’s paintings embrace an orientation separate from a strictly Cartesian understanding of space. The paintings arrive at their destinations through a range of solutions on painting surfaces and shapes that never begin or end in the same place, their surfaces often arcing away from the wall. In these recent paintings, Conover continues to call on the shape, texture, and color of her surroundings to evoke the light and physicality of the built and natural environment by addressing the constraints of two-dimensional wall painting. Her irregularly shaped canvases—bowed polygons—support canvases of varied textures and transparencies, allowing for both sculptural support and image to visually coexist in the perception of the work. Most surfaces are linen, canvas, and polyester fabric joined in stitching, which is an intrinsic element of the composition. As the artist writes about these works,
“The paintings begin as geometric line drawings that I build into non-rectangular structures, supporting a dyed canvas ground and subsequent layers of paint. The irregular nature of each painting’s support emphasizes the perimeter, yet each form remains singular, invoking but not settling on topographical and bodily subjects.”
Invoking the historical painting languages of American modernism, from Arthur Dove to Helen Frankenthaler, Conover’s paintings complicate this heritage in several ways. Her paintings are scaffolds of the stuff of the earth, building blocks of material weight mixed with evanescent passages of light, air, and gesture suggesting multiple points of view and moments in time. As the viewer contends with the ins and outs of interlocking planes of pure abstraction in the paintings, Conover adds the angular--sometimes anthropomorphic—element of the shaped frame. Drumlin presents as a full-length figure striking a gestural stance in relation to neighboring work; hip jutting out, elbow akimbo. Tharp Trace (II), on the other hand, gently bows off the wall, a body, or the earth itself, exhaling. Finally, by selectively adhering rocks and stones into and onto the canvas, Conover ties painting to the physical and geologic environment; but with that gesture, also divorces the work from natural representation into the realm of collage, embracing its formal and philosophical layered viewpoints. As such, the artist’s point of view as a speculative artificial space predominates in this multifaceted series of paintings which evolve unexpectedly at every turn.
For all inquiries, please contact Lisa Kurzner at lisa@abattoirgallery.com
