Elise Engler

Frosch & Co is pleased to present History Paintings, New York City based Elise Engler’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show features a new series of large-scale paintings that blend personal, cultural, and political history into a visual narrative of past decades.

Known for her Diary of a Radio Junkie: 1888 Days of Waking Up to the News which consisted of finishing a small work on paper each and every day for over five years, Engler’s art has long explored themes of time and accumulation. Depicting one day, the painting Insurrection, January 6, 2021 is a blown-up version of the small gouache made the day after the attack on the U.S. Capitol and marks a transition from her Diary of a Radio Junkie series, expanding from postcard size one-day depictions to large decade-spanning narratives.

Insurrection led to the other four works in the show, with each painting capturing the essence of the 1950s through the 1980s. Instead of painting about one day, the time element is ten years, divided by decades, the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. In her unique visual language, Engler incorporates imagery drawn from personal, cultural, scientific and political history. Her monumental compositions are filled with portraits of significant figures, family photos, news clippings, technological advancements and cultural icons. The plethora of elements dissolve into each other and are interspersed with decade inspired patterns. The exhibition offers a deeply personal yet universally relatable perspective on the convergence of personal and collective history.

Calling artist Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) her muse, Elise Engler’s paintings challenge traditional notions of public art. In reflecting on her connection to Stettheimer, Engler notes:

“We share an unpracticed religion, we never married, and coincidentally, we are New Yorkers, born on the same day, eighty-five years apart. Stettheimer made history paintings, the four paintings in the 'Cathedral' series in the Metropolitan Museum are filled with images of real people, famous and not, curators, politicians, writers, artists, and friends and family against a background of New York City historical events and places. They are lyrical, funny, packed with information and ever so beautifully painted.”

“Must history (…) be conceived of as something idealized, distant and dead that happened to other people, or is it something that involves the self? And what, precisely, are the boundaries between the public and the private? Why has such a distinction been made in the creation of art? All these issues are raised, although hardly resolved, by the art of Florine Stettheimer.”

—Linda Nochlin in a revised essay, Art in America (1980)

Elise Engler’s work has been recognized through numerous fellowships and residencies, including the National Science Foundation Antarctica Artist and Writers fellowship, two MacDowell fellowships, a Yaddo residency and a residency at Civitella Ranieri (Italy). Her book A Diary of the Plague Year: An Illustrated Chronicle of 2020 (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt) was published in 2022. She is a teaching artist at Battery Park City and teaches at City College, City University of New York and at the School of Visual Arts. Engler is currently writing a memoir closely connected to the work in this exhibition.