elise Engler

Elise Engler is an artist who lives and works in Manhattan and renders extensive, orderly representation of every object, every person and every experience within chosen situations. Her object is another’s subjective experience.  Between taxonomy and natural history, Engler’s infinitely voluminous paintings and drawings capture a vast worldview with endless, information-rich content. Her work has ranged from most recently documenting science to earlier projects chronicling U.S. tax expenditures, drawing the contents of women’s bags and drawing everything she owned.

In the winter of 2009/10 the artist won the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Award that resulted in a residency in Antarctica.  Survival Trench(2011) captures the first night experience of all who attend “survival school” whereas Iceberg From Helicopter (2011) portrays a contour of white, raised ice looming over the flat snow surface that surrounds it. Ninety-Degree Draft (2009-11) consists of ten works on paper that begin with a depiction of the white continent in the middle of a field of blue.  Hundreds of detailed drawings of people, places and things as well as text populate the surface of each piece creating a visual time line of the journey.

In 2008 Engler was Artist-in-Residence on the Research Vessel Wecoma.  While traveling along the Oregon/ Washington coast, the artist’s focus was to capture the implements used and people studying oceanic and climate change in a series of drawings.  Engler’s drawings were recently included in The Arts Exchange Gallery’s The Bank and Trust Show in White Plains, New York. Her drawing was shown at the National Academy Museum’s 185th Annual: An Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary American Art. Elise Engler’s art also appears in the collections of Agnes Gund, The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive in Miami and the Nobel collection in Switzerland.  The artist will begin 2013 with a solo show at Robert Henry Contemporary, located in Bushwick, Brooklyn, opening on January 11th and closing February 10th.  Engler will also participate in a three-person show titled BiPOLAR, Journeys to the Ends of the World that will appear at the College of Saint Rose Gallery located in Albany, New York from January 20th to March 1st, 2013.