Gross McCleaf Gallery artist Elizabeth Geiger gets ready for her one-woman show Borrowed Rhythms, where she presents around 16 new paintings featuring still life subject matter. The artist focuses on large presentations that are heavily influenced by early 20th century art history, “borrowing” from iconic masters to try and understand their intentions and turning her entire process on its head.
Still Life After Picasso and De Heem, oil on linen, 52 x 69"
“A formidable member of the ‘perceptual painting’ community, Geiger has more recently expanded her still-life painting practice into new territory,” explains Morgan Hobbs, assistant director of Gross McCleaf Gallery. “While her chosen imagery remains the same, arrangements of objects on a table, these new compositions take notes from the compositions of Picasso and Honoré Sharrer. Geiger’s latest body of work is as humorous and playful as it is serious and virtuous painting.”
Geiger also explains that this change to her work began as a response to her lack of excitement for painting under her old process of what she calls “an intense tennis match.” She continues, “It felt like a performance…I could set up something and pretty much know in advance what the painting would look like. I kept having a feeling of déjà vu while painting—haven’t I made this painting before? I knew something had to change or I would quit painting. It took me a while to realize it wasn’t the subject matter that needed to change, but me. How I painted and thought about painting needed to change. The only way I could see doing this was looking at different art.”
Still Life with Blue Cloth, Jug & Wine, oil on linen, 40 x 48"
Geiger began this journey by first exploring Dutch still life from the 17th-century—visiting the work of artists like Melendez, Gainsborough and Claude Lorrain. “Without realizing it, I was looking at people who were very inventive painters, not pure observation painters,” she says. “This work was something beyond my comfort zone of realism—it was based on drawing and imagination. Some of the Dutch painters would purposely make still lifes containing flowers that bloomed at different times of year and fruit from different seasons, meaning they couldn’t have been looking at the set up as we see it. Looking at this work changed my priorities over time.”
Still Life with Fruit, Cabbage & Recorder, oil on linen, 36 x 40"
We see these changes come to life in show pieces like Side Table Still Life—a large, imaginative and shape driven work, created after completing a series of at least 10 other paintings of the same (or similar) setup. “I knew I wanted to experiment and was looking at George Braque, who has a wonderful quote that says, ‘The painting is finished when the original idea is obliterated,’” says Geiger. “I enjoy thinking about this quote. It has helped me let go of early stages of a painting so as to find new territory…”
Geiger’s new process entails quite a lot of experimentation and revision so as to get into a “modernist mindset as opposed to a realistic one.” When exploring cubism in modern works, she found that “anytime something starts to move back in space, you have to stop and do the opposite. Hence the wonky drawing. It’s really an attempt to keep the energy of the painting always and everywhere moving forward…,” she says.
Side Table Still Life, oil on linen, 42 x 36"This energy also shows up in Geiger’s other works like Still Life After Picasso and De Heem, started because “I love the elaborate groupings and masses of objects of the Dutch still life painters but was also interested in the streamlined and playful modernists,” she says of the painting inspired by Picasso and a Matisse copy of a De Heem piece shown at MoMA.
See these striking pieces and so much more at Gross McCleaf Gallery from March 1 to 25, with an opening reception celebration on March 11 from 1 to 4 p.m. —
Gross McCleaf Gallery, 127 S. 16th Street • Philadelphia, PA 19102 • (215) 665-8138 • www.grossmccleaf.com
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