Meticulous illusions & constructions: Eleanor Conover on her work at INDEPENDENT New York

Abattoir is pleased to present a solo presentation of new works by Eleanor Conover at Independent, 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.

With your use of bowed stretchers and your creation of convex, protruding canvases, your visual language is guided by reorientation. What are some specific elements of reorientation and playing with the viewers’ perception that attract you to this approach?

I’m invested in extending the idea of pictorial instability and thinking about the way in which it serves as a metaphor for lived experience. The shape of each painting is never repeated, so the painting project is a constant re-negotiation of composition and space within newly imagined objects. This is a demanding process and experience, and yet I am attracted to the challenge of what it means to be in the process of building a new and evolving spatial language.

Lived and observed experience is punctuated by learning that sight is always in flux. To look at a bowed painting from the side versus the front means apprehending a completely different shape and surface. I think a lot about drawing the figure, actually, and the way that one learns about how to begin with the angles of a figure’s hips and shoulders, the movement of the spine, and also the challenge of foreshortening. Every pose, every model, is different. The paintings aren’t intended to be specifically about figuration or about topography, but they lean towards these forms.

What are some ways that you hope or encourage viewers to engage with your work, especially with its elements of three-dimensionality and visible structure and substrata?

I hope viewers engage with the work in an authentic way that makes sense to them and their positioning in the world. I hope the work feels accessible, even if it is engaged with a very specific history of painting and objecthood. Elements like weight, tension, and transparency that are present in the work are formal ideas that also have affective possibilities.

We know what it’s like to carry something in our pockets, to hold a deep breath in our lungs, to look through a window, but to still be aware of the window frame. I’m also committed to a specific context of painting that involves process-based abstraction, and the visible substrata gestures towards this. The graphite rubbing of the supports reinforces their presence and reminds the viewers of its shape and how the painting is held together.

Your process has been called self-reflexive. Has engaging with the creative process always been a significant part of how you make art, or has it developed over time? Who are some other artists with similar dialectical approaches that have influenced you?

Consistent, daily engagement in the work has allowed me to generate a rhythm and process that is more organic than it once was. I had to learn through practice that leading with a desired end result was not a helpful way for me to think about painting. I save all the wood offcuts from my support building process. I have many stones kicking around in my studio that I have collected through the years, some of which are accidentally covered in paint and then literally end up in the paintings.

I also have a large pile of dyed scraps of canvas and linen. I feel grounded by this raw material and the way fragments eventually make their way into the work. Through this, I am reminded that the paintings are at once both illusions and constructions. We are awash in the instantaneous generation of material—knowledge, images, etc., and most of us do not understand how this information is produced. Like my excellent high school calculus teacher taught me to do, I want to show my work. Artists who I feel drawn to for their idiosyncratic, open use of material include Merlin James, Helen O’Leary, Vivian Suter, Dorthea Rockburne, Patrick Saytour, Sam Gilliam, Miyoko Ito, Marsden Hartley, and Cezanne, among so many others.

You incorporate handmade and craft traditions into your works – are there any specific traditions that made an impression on you early on and that have carried over into your practice? What are some ways that you attempt to reconfigure these traditions into something new?

I don’t have a background in craft traditions, and I am really coming at this backwards—which is to say, I am finding the desire and need to learn more as I deepen my specific approach to painting and support construction. My mother studied and worked in fashion and apparel design, and her excellent sewing and fabric construction skills far surpass mine. Through the years, she has helped me learn about draping, patterns, sewing, etc.

When I lived in Tennessee, I became interested in dyeing fabric and learning about natural dyes. With dyed fabric, I learned about the nature of color—how it changes depending on what material it is presented through. A dyed red canvas expresses red much differently than a cadmium red out of a tube painted on top of a white gessoed canvas.  It was helpful to stop painting for a while and learn this seemingly very obvious fact in a self-directed, experiential way. While living in the South, I also learned how ideas like this were incorporated into the pedagogy at nearby Black Mountain College. Anni Albers’ treatment of materiality and color across weaving and drawing continues to inspire me.

A major foundation for your works is the deconstructive qualities of avant-garde poetry, such as the fragmented treatment of language seen in Susan Howe’s work. Do you create any writing pieces of your own at the early stages of a new work, or use specific writings of others as foundations?

I am no poetry scholar! But I think I came to become more confident in painted abstraction through understanding abstract language. Susan Howe looms large for me in the way she is part poet, part researcher, and part artist. I read Beckett’s Molloy during the pandemic, and I was exposed to Fred Moten’s work through a symposium on Beauford Delaney at the University of Tennessee. The jumps that these writers take across logic, space, and time—the way language is treated as malleable, or plastic, to use a painting term—feels relevant.

When I am beginning a body of work and feel lost, I have to remind myself that brush marks and colors are like words—units that are constantly used over and over again by all sorts of people in different arrangements and contexts. Somehow, this is reassuring to me. I do fold what I am reading into the work in often invisible ways, and I keep an ongoing studio journal that helps me understand what I am making through time.