![]() Then, with two weeks to go before the meeting, she got to work.ĭouglas began painting abstract forms on random objects around her house-aluminum foil, found images, a set of Batman bed sheets-and photographed the results. She set up a Skype date with a professor, painter Willem de Rooij. In late 2014, hearing that many schools in Europe were free, she called a friend who had gone to the Städelschule in Frankfurt-one of the top art schools in the world, with a reputation for fostering experimental work. When I started getting close to 30, I freaked out, realizing that I wasn’t actually moving forward with the endeavor that I was supposedly designing my life around.”Įliza Douglas, I Am the Horse you Should Bet On (I) (2016). “But for many years I wasn’t able to get artistically unstuck. “I always sought out low-commitment and short-term jobs because I wanted to preserve the potential for being an artist,” Douglas tells artnet News. She tried going back to school for social work, but eventually abandoned that too. When she did, she jumped around to different day jobs-a waitress at a macrobiotic restaurant, a receptionist at a friend’s barbershop-and toured in several bands. It took her five years to finish undergrad. Though, halfway through her second year, she was kicked out of the program for missing classes. Inspired by a high school photo class, she decided to go to Bard, a school known for its photo department. She did some modeling when she was 13 and 14 for brands like Helmut Lang, but didn’t pursue it because of the constant rejection. She hit her growth spurt at an early age and has been roughly the height she is now-over six feet tall-since then. She was born and raised in the West Village, in the same house where both her grandmother and father grew up. Finding Her Footingĭouglas, a fifth-generation New Yorker, is the daughter of a lawyer and an elementary school teacher. After all, she didn’t start painting in earnest until 2015.Įliza Douglas, Weird, the Real Kind (2) (2017). “All these ways we’ve been taught to read painting, regardless of how conceptually situated it is, she kind of mucks with.”Īll of this is high praise considering the relative newness of Douglas’s career. “Douglas’s work raises questions about authorship and how we value painting its connection to the artist’s hand, and our ability to understand the technical virtuosity,” Taxter says. (The majority are reproductions of canonized classics or hotel decorations.) In other cases, she has ordered entire compositions from Dafen, a village in China that produces more than half of the world’s paintings. As she does for much of her work, she hired another painter to render the more detailed hands, while the sleeves are her own handiwork. Photo: Jason Mandella.ĭouglas did not make the paintings on view at the Jewish Museum alone. Installation view of the exhibition “Eliza Douglas,” May 4 – October 21, 2018, Courtesy of the Jewish Museum, NY. I wanted to know what was going on there.” “There was a sense of irony that I couldn’t quite place. “I thought her paintings were mysterious and sort of funny,” she recalls. She encountered her work again in 2017, when Douglas was included in a group show at James Fuentes Gallery in New York. Douglas was an undergrad on the same campus. Taxter first met the artist in the late 2000s when she was in grad school at CCS Bard. “She forces you to think about the relationship between the two.” “There’s a stark tension between the figurative and the abstract,” says Kelly Taxter, an associate curator at the Jewish Museum, who organized the show. The hands are delicate and lifelike the sleeves, sloppy and gestural. The paintings, titled Shadow and Light and Blood and Bones after lines in Dorothea Lasky poems, both feature a pair of hands connected to flimsy, elongated arms that wind around the outside of otherwise blank canvases. Photo courtesy of Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images.ĭouglas and I met at the Jewish Museum, where her two new paintings hang in the lobby-her first museum presentation in the US. Eliza Douglas in Anne Imhof’s Faust at the 2017 Venice Biennale. ![]()
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