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.
Her 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.
In 2023, the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno presented Elisheva Biernoff: Reservoirs of Time, the artist’s first major solo museum show. Fraenkel Gallery presented solo exhibitions of Biernoff’s work in 2017, 2021, and 2024. Each exhibition has been accompanied by comprehensive monographs, published by the gallery, which reproduce many of the works at exact scale, recto and verso.
Biernoff received an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BA from Yale University. She also studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. The artist was recently in residence at the MacDowell Colony, and her work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Asian Art Museum, and CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco; New Orleans Museum of Art; Copenhagen’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. Biernoff’s work is included in the collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others.
