Elise Adibi

Nineteenth century critic Gottfried Semper theorized weaving to be the germ of architecture’s structural thinking. Semper’s ideas have influenced Adibi’s relationship to the woven surface of her paintings. Whether through the weave of the raw canvas, which she considers to be a grid before any marks have been made, or as a drawn pencil lattice, Adibi presents the grid as a living form, complicating its modernist legacy as an emblem of the anti-natural.

In her most recent body of work, Adibi applies a mixture of oil paints and pure essential plant oils to canvas. The paintings will be installed in the gallery, accompanied by viewing benches scented with a lavender fragrance created by Adibi using plant oils inspired by the vegetation found in Los Angeles. The perfume contains jasmine, orange, lemon, bergamot, cedar wood, and lavender. Both a color and a smell, lavender has a long history of medicinal and healing properties. Lavender and humans have co-evolved: at once soothing and invigorating, its smell resonates in our psyches.

By infusing Full Haus’ modernist architecture with a potent unseen substance, Adibi’s work binds together viewer and paintings with a bodily experience: volatile lavender molecules physically enter the nasal passages of a perceiver. The paintings, the aromatherapy, the architecture, and the viewer become a single ecosystem.

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Elise Adibi has had solo exhibitions at Louis B. James (2014), Churner and Churner (2012), and Southfirst (2010) in New York, as well as numerous group exhibitions, including Gertrude’s/Lot at the Andy Warhol Museum. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University from 2013-2014, where she presented a solo exhibition entitled Metabolic Paintings (2013). Her paintings are included in Thames & Hudson’s Painting Now, as well as William J. Simmon’s influential essay Notes on Queer Formalism; her work has also appeared in Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times, among others. Adibi holds a BA from Swarthmore College (1988) and a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania (1994). She earned her MFA in painting from Columbia University in 2007.