Judith Eisler is the New York based painter who gathers inspiration and imagery from watching films and photographing stills before transforming her chosen footage typically into glossy surfaces blurring the features with paint strokes. From Today at 7pm One Work Gallery in Vienna will house a new exhibition titled One work.
Eisler was born in New York in 1962, and now works between the Big Apple and Vienna. Her work is often compared to painter Gerhard Richter due to their similar working method or creating imagery with a blurred and dreamlike authentic.
She received her BFA from Cornell University in 1984. In 2002 she won the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and was the Artist in Residence at the University of Tennessee in 2004. Since 2009 she been teaching painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
As an artist her aim it to investigate a reality that she views though screens and layers of technology and digital interference. She is interested in interpreting something that is recognizable to the viewer, but her main concern has always been to understand how the abstractions characteristic in her work and process will always be what makes the image. Not being interested in the linear narrative that exists in the film, nor the linear perspective she creates a new narrative in all her paintings.
We live in a time where cinema is an fantasy that we genuinely accept as an alternative reality. It has become so engrained in our shared and sub culture, that it is used as a vehicle to alter the watcher, shape their vision, identity and thoughts.
By being able to pause the narrative and isolate moments and imagery, Eisler is attempting to understand what we are seeing. She then is able to translate in and reinterpret what it really is that we perceive as real. Always looking to freeze a precise moment that embodies an action, an emotion, and a psychological tension. Eisler explores in her work what happens when the temporality of cinema and our perception of reality at that given time is interrupted with the medium of painting and transformed into a static image with a new meaning.
Eisler’s work will be on show at One Work Gallery from June 9, 2015 to July 2, 2015.