Liz Nielsen
April 8 – May 7, 2016
Press Release -
Danziger Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Liz Nielsen. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Its title “The Medium” refers both to the ever expanding reach and potential of the photographic medium as well as art’s power as a mystical intervening agency delivering spaces of transcendence.
Liz Nielsen’s work joins and adds to the historical tradition of the photogram – one of the medium’s earliest processes - but one which has enjoyed a renaissance in the worlds of contemporary art and color photography. Simply described, a photogram is an image created without a camera by placing objects or shining light directly onto photographic paper and developing the paper. Each picture is by nature unique - a record of the moment or event created by the artist.
A pioneer in what could be called photographic abstract expressionism, Nielsen audaciously experiments with photographic process, expressing her individual psyche while attempting to tap into universal sources of imagination. Even when creating images based on visual realities, Nielsen favors a highly abstracted mode.
To make her pictures, Nielsen cuts, shapes, layers, draws on, and assembles transparent color gels into a handmade “negative” through which she projects varied light sources onto photographic paper – from an enlarger light to lasers to cellphone lights (and everything in-between). These different lights allow Nielsen to essentially paint onto the paper in broad to narrow strokes. Color fields wash or overlap, small forms appear within forms, shapes shift.
In her latest work - which makes up the body of this show - Nielsen has for the first time used Fujiflex paper – a paper known for it’s glossy surface and richness of color. Working in a new studio space, she has created pictures at a larger scale than was previously possible for her and which allow her to further explore the expressive potential of color. Reflective and cerebral, Nielsen’s pictorial notions make an elemental impact somewhere between the luminous and the sublime.
Liz Nielsen was born in Wisconsin in 1975 and lives and works in New York City. She received a M.F.A. in Photography at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a B.F.A from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Nielsen’s work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and Berlin, and reviewed in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal.