BIOGRAPHY
Eliza Douglas (1984, New York) lives and works in both Berlin and New York. Aside from painting, now expressed to be “the focus of my life”, Eliza has also been known to record music, model for major brands such as Balenciaga and Vetements, and notably collaborated with her partner, Anne Imhof, on Faust, winning the Golden Lion Award at the 2017 Venice Biennale.
Avoiding categorization Douglas’ work over the years has stemmed from her early preoccupations with girls and death. In her powerful pieces she references the body, illustrating disembodied hands and feet in refined detail while allowing the extensions to run wild and seemingly dance around the absent body, exploring the otherwise empty canvas. The dualities of both meticulous realism and painterly abstraction, and control and lawless freedom, unequivocally absorb the viewer.
Eliza has held a number of major exhibitions in the USA and abroad, amongst others My Gleaming Soul, 6 /12 Weeks, Folkwang Museum, Essen 2016; Old Tissues Filled with Tears, Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin and most lately her solo show at the Jewish Museum in NY, 2018.
“I was overwhelmed with what felt like the limitless possibilities of art. This is largely what led me to painting: the tangible boundaries paintings seem to have. They are mostly contained within squares or rectangles, and there is a set of tools that are standardly used to make them. And then there is the challenge of the medium’s history.
The more abstract, gestural elements of my work could easily be seen as stand-ins or replacements for the body.”