Jeff Elrod “This Brutal World” at Luhring Augustine

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce This Brutal World, concurrent exhibitions of new paintings by Jeff Elrod in our Chelsea and Bushwick galleries.

Elrod’s practice is rooted in the tradition of American twentieth-century abstract painting. He began painting abstractions inspired by supergraphics and video game imagery in the early 1990s. In 1996, he began to use the computer – specifically a mouse – to facilitate paintings through a technique he calls “frictionless drawing”. Using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, he creates digital drawings that he then renders on canvas by hand with tape and acrylic paint. His paintings are also often made by printing reworked digitized imagery directly onto canvas via inkjet printer. He has recently experimented with shaped canvases as well, using these same techniques of printing and hand painting on these unique forms. Throughout his work, Elrod aims to depict a kind of “screen space” in order to examine the dichotomy between traditional painterly space and the virtual space of the computer.

The exhibition in Chelsea will present new paintings that explore the range of Elrod’s digital and analog processes. The Bushwick exhibition will focus on a series of new “blur” paintings. The inspiration for the “blur” paintings comes from the “Dream Machine”, a device created by artist and poet Brion Gysin and scientist Ian Sommerville in 1959. Their machine uses oscillating light frequencies to stimulate the optical nerves while the viewer’s eyes are closed. Elrod evokes the hallucinatory retinal effects of the “Dream Machine” by processing his original drawings into blurred images to create overall fields of colored soft cloud-like forms that resist focus.