McKenzie Fine Art is pleased to commence the new year with an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Brooklyn-based artist Lori Ellison. Ellison was featured in the gallery’s 2008 group show Horror Vacui; this will be her first solo outing here.

The exhibition will include ink on notebook paper drawings and gouache on panel paintings. Also in the show will be paintings executed on shaped panels in various materials ranging from enamel and glitter to egg tempera. These paintings have never been exhibited previously. Although the exhibition is mostly recent work, it will include works spanning the past two decades. What unifies the paintings and drawings is the artist’s interest in obsessive patterning and intimate scale. Whether executed in monochromatic grid patterns or playful, organically meandering compositions, Ellison repeats single motifs throughout her compositions: wedges, circles, rectangles, and forms within forms, as well as tendril-like shapes, ropes and linked chains, among many others. Her abstract motifs, referencing nature, textile patterns, and architectural decoration, fill the pictorial space in all-over densities. The works reveal an intensity of focus and an embrace of the manifold pleasures of the slow read. As the artist has noted, her interest is in “Proportion based on the lyric, not the epic – that is where the juice lives….Art that is the size and resonance of a haiku, quiet and solid as the ground beneath one’s feet…A discreet art, valiantly purified of the whole hodgepodge of artist’s tricks and tics.”

Lori Ellison holds an MFA from the Tyler School of Art. Recent exhibitions include Valentine Gallery in Ridgewood, NY; Sideshow Gallery in Brooklyn; Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles; and Geoffrey Young Gallery in Great Barrington, MA. Her work is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art.