Opening Reception Sunday Dec 3, 2023 11am – 4pm
Exhibition Dates Dec 3, 2023 – Feb 3, 2024

Emerson Dorsch Gallery
5900 NW 2nd Av
Miami, Florida

More info: Elisabeth Condon at Emerson Dorsch

Emerson Dorsch is proud to announce Tempus Fugit, a new solo exhibition by Elisabeth Condon. Known for a style that marries joy in the mark of unfurling ribbons of paint with landscape and more recently with elements of bourgeois decoration, Condon’s new paintings channel freedom found when boundaries break down.

We at Emerson Dorsch have witnessed Elisabeth Condon’s painterly lexicon grow over the last seventeen years of working together. Here’s a primer. Condon associates seasonal migrations between her studios in New York and Florida with the way both landscape and time are represented in 5th Century Tang Dynasty paintings. Frequent travel to residencies around the world have reinforced her impressions. This led her to incorporate both landscape elements and Chinese brushwork into many of her compositions. She often begins her paintings with the mark of poured paint, a planned accident around which she builds the composition. This mark bears the legacy of Abstract Expressionists, especially Sam Francis and Helen Frankenthaler, and their painterly form and philosophy. These forms can cohere into psychedelic visions or other openings for transcendence, for even in moments of rebellion, it is the transcendence that she’s always after.

Meditations on childhood rebellion led Condon to interrogate what she was rebelling against. In brief, the object of her rebellion was the bourgeois, patriarchal, and stringent religious constraints she grew up with. The most potent symbol of those constraints became décor elements, especially the lattice motif, a pattern in her childhood home in Los Angeles. Finally, color and paint. Elisabeth Condon has a savant’s fluency in color and viscosity. She can identify exact hues; Hansa Yellow Medium is PY83 and also dialaride yellow. She experiments with all number of techniques and applications, creating intricate compositions that layer numerous moves. The paintings for Tempus Fugit have her at the peak of her powers.