If, because the saying goes, endurance is a advantage, the artist Elisheva Biernoff should be as virtuous as they arrive. Her portray method requires a staggering quantity of focus: Utilizing previous images of strangers she sources from eBay and vintage shops, she painstakingly re-creates the pictures at a one-to-one scale—entrance and again—in tiny brushstrokes atop paper-thin plywood. She works on one portray at a time, and every takes three or 4 months to finish.
“They’re type of…all-consuming,” the San Fransisco–based mostly Biernoff, 45, says. She solely makes a couple of handful of work per yr. “I like residing with one in every of them, having that bond.”
Biernoff developed her idiosyncratic method out of a love of different individuals’s images, which she started exploring in school at Yale, the place she was pre-med whereas additionally learning artwork. (“I assumed that I might be a physician that made artwork,” she says. An agonizing natural chemistry class proved in any other case, and artwork prevailed.)
In 2009, the yr she received her MFA from the California Faculty of the Arts, she was invited to design a window for the San Francisco Artwork Fee’s Artwork in Storefronts initiative. Biernoff requested individuals within the neighborhood to submit household pictures, which she’d replicate utilizing paint for her set up. The consequence was like a group front room wall, full of all of the intimacy of a photograph album however elevated by the hyperattention her portray course of calls for. Making artwork this manner introduced her nearer to individuals and locations that had been in any other case not recognized to her. She was hooked.
Since then she’s had solo exhibits in California (notably on the prestigious Fraenkel Gallery, which represents her), Nevada, and Canada. Now she will be able to add New York to that checklist, with the current opening of “Elsewhere,” her first solo present on the East Coast, at David Zwirner gallery’s elegant Higher East Facet city home (a becoming setting for artworks based mostly on household pictures).
The present is sort of a mini retrospective, with 27 works spanning from 2011 to 2025. Alongside the work of previous images is a more moderen work referred to as Highway Not Taken (2024), Biernoff’s current exploration of the trompe l’oeil. Its 9 part work appear like paint-by-number kits—“front room artwork,” as Biernoff says—however in reality they’ve been labored over fairly meticulously by hand. Even the wooden grain of the frames is the artist’s doing.
Elisheva Biernoff, Creation, 2025. © Elisheva Biernoff. Courtesy of David Zwirner.Picture: Kerry McFate
