I’ve been following Eleanor Conover’s work since a serendipitous encounter a few years back. Walking down Horatio toward the Whitney Museum, I caught a glimpse of Conover’s shaped canvases installed as a part of REGISTERED at White Columns. Her new works presented by Abattoir Gallery maintain what I have known of her stretcher structures, resisting not just the assumed rectangle of a painting but also the fixed depth of the canvas from the wall. Her canvases bow out from the wall like faceted gems reflecting the light, or like the literal mountain forms rising perpendicular to their base.
The canvases themselves are a composite of many sections quilted together, forming the architecture of their painting and breaking up space with the seams of each section. Conover’s marks in paint, dyes, and even drawing materials like graphite reinforce or defy the underlying structure. Sometimes the crazy network of stretcher bars peeks through a particularly sheer section of material. Some of the paintings even incorporate pockets sewn into the canvases to hold bits of rock, a reminder of Conover’s commitment to the landscape even through the language of abstraction.
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