Michael Kohn Gallery is thrilled to present a collection of Recent Paintings by California-based artist Sharon Ellis. This exhibition of intimate imaginative landscapes showcases Ellis’ affinity for the natural world, offering a visually poetic rendering of indescribable environmental phenomena and the earthly sublime through saturated colors, veinous lines, and masterful symmetry. Developed over five years, this new body of work is a highlight in a career spanning four decades. Recent Paintings opens on June 21 and will be on view through August 9, 2025.
The elements in Ellis’ lush visions are cast like characters in a play. Through what the artist describes as a “completely irrational series of decisions,” a simple focus on the time of day or season is transformed into an optical incantation. Ellis’ romantic world features blankets of glimmering stars hovering over sinuous mountains, their folds rendered like draped fabric, or the scarlet hue of the harvest moon peeking through the vegetal gestures of towering trees. Works like Fairy Garden, the first of this series, are not representational; though they embody the spirit of camaraderie between nature and humans that transcends language.
Leah Ollman writes, “To describe Fairy Garden —or any of Ellis' paintings, really—strains language. It seems as though it shouldn't be so hard, because the forms declare themselves with unusual precision. The hues are radiant, vigorous. The surface is pristine, Ellis' ultra-soft brushes leaving no visible tracks. There is no vagueness or murky indecision. There are no false leads. But words comparably crisp, definitive and controlled miss the astonishing sense of surrender that the paintings attest to, and induce.”
The reverie lies further in Ellis’ immaculate planes; up to sixty layers of alkyd paint create impenetrable, luminous surfaces that hide all traces of the painter’s hand. Ellis’ abstractions owe as much to the physical process as to her artistic predecessors. Among her influences are painters Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, and Charles Burchfield. These early American modernists inherited the European traditions of Romantic landscape, Symbolism, and Art Nouveau but were intensely devoted to expanding the potential of abstraction in the pictorial realm. This radical ability to synthesize the conventions of naturalistic forms with inventive compositions is fundamental to Ellis’ work.
