Jeronimo Elespe

JERONIMO ELESPE May 5 – June 14, 2013 | 195 Chrystie St, NY

Eleven Rivington is thrilled to present a solo exhibition of recent work by Madrid-based Spanish artist Jeronimo Elespe, on view from May 5 – June 14, 2013 at our 195 Chrystie Street location.  This is the artist’s thirteenth solo exhibition since he first started exhibiting in 1999 and his second show with Eleven Rivington.  It will feature new paintings on aluminum as well as never before exhibited drawings.  Elespe was the subject of a solo museum exhibition in 2012 at Centro de Arte Contemporaneo (CAC) in Malaga, Spain, which was accompanied by a hardcover catalogue with text by Dan Byers.

Elespe is known for his intimately scaled paintings in oil on aluminum, but drawing has been a key part of his practice for many years. The gallery is pleased to be exhibiting drawn works for the first time in tandem with recent paintings.  These small works on paper entail a long process of adding and subtracting marks, lines, tones and textures, developing into a series of abstract diaries. Although they are autonomous in nature, the artist considers the drawings as a guide to the viewer, proposing a more complete reading of the paintings. The artist’s accumulative process is perhaps more explicit in the drawings and helps to underscore the experimentation of painting idioms developed in the painted aluminum works.  As in his past work, the subjects and points of departure in the artwork are autobiographical. Created in Elespe’s home studio in Madrid, they begin as images from observation and memory, including interior domestic scenes, solitary figures, and still-life compositions, serving as a meditation on daily domestic and studio life.  Over the course of their creation, some remain specifically representational while others become layered abstract ruminations on nature and time, with fictional elements attempting to enter the pictures. Others tap even more into the artist’s subconscious imaginings. The dualities that manifest in the work - the tranquil and the obsessive, experimentation and literality, intuition and rationality - have their root embedded in the nature of the slow process of their making in the Elespe's studio.

Jeronimo Elespe was born 1975 in Madrid, Spain where he currently lives and works. He was educated at Yale (MFA) and SVA (BFA).  Recent group exhibitions include Sikkema Jenkins, NY; Pedro Cera, Lisbon; and Nusser and Baumgart, Munich.  His work has been featured in The New York Times, New Yorker, New York, and El Pais.