ART CITIES: N.York-Elisheva Biernoff
Elisheva Biernoff’s paintings of photographs involve close looking and slow painting: lingering over pictures of strangers and paying attention to the overlooked and undervalued. The paintings are simulated artifacts, remade to scale as truly as possible. To create this work, the artist finds photographs of domestic scenes and anonymous people who wouldn’t necessarily be the subject of paintings. By painting the photographs, Biernoff brings the latent emotional content to the surface.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
Elisheva Biernoff’s source photographs touch on shared experiences and often include some slightly remarkable or unusual aspect, or some type of photographic failure. Recent work has incorporated multiple images and objects from nature or architecture. Biernoff uses these elements in larger, complex arrangements that recreate sections of the walls on which the photographs are installed, highlighting the sculptural aspect of her practice and providing a context for the images.
The exhibition “Elsewhere” span Biernoff’s career, featuring a representative selection of her intimately scaled paintings. Working with meticulous fidelity and care, the artist uses fine, luminous brushstrokes to create intricately painted depictions of anonymous photographs, which she sources from antique stores and online marketplaces. Biernoff paints on paper-thin plywood, replicating each detail and blemish, front and back, from the original object in a methodical process that is deeply deliberate and reflective; she only produces around four works each year. Individually mounted on handmade poplar stands, the resultant images exist at the nexus of painting, sculpture, and photography. Biernoff’s works are activated by the viewer’s close looking and emotional connection, yet they are also imbued with an inexorable sense of distance—a longing for another place, face, or moment in one’s life.
Also on view are examples from Biernoff’s recent body of large-format multimedia compositions that explore the rich historical tradition of the trompe l’oeil. Inspired by vintage paint-by-number sets, the multipart “Road Not Taken” (2024) comprises nine sculptural paintings of bucolic open roads that are based on photographs shot by the artist and her friends and family. While nodding to the pleasant, nostalgic aesthetic and commercial kitsch of the scenes found in these do-it-yourself paintings, the work also draws a parallel between the democratization of imagemaking proffered by both these craft kits and the medium of home photography. Other works in the show take the form of delicately painted assemblages, such as “Fragment” (2024), in which a painted postcard of a twelfth-century stone carving is affixed to a faux wood panel using a handmade ceramic pushpin; the artist includes faded rectangles in her painted rendition of the wood surface, suggesting the existence of other images that are lost yet might one day be rediscovered. Exploring the slippage that occurs between the experience of reality and the memories that remain after the fact, Biernoff’s poignant and visually captivating paintings serve as, in the artist’s words, “reservoirs of time.”
Photo: Elisheva Biernoff, Shadow Box, 2024-2025, Glazed ceramic, acrylic, and plywood in hand-painted wood grain frame, 8 3/4 x 8 3/4 x 2 3/8 inches (22.2 x 22.2 x 6 cm), © Elisheva Biernoff, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 34 East 69th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 8/1-28/2/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidzwirner.com/
