Ellen Berkenblit

2024-2025

Ellen Berkenblit’s extensive body of work employs the simplified language of cartooning to be our guide through the complexity of painting. Berkenblit’s lexicon of characters includes a recurring female whose Pinocchio-esque nose is often truncated at the canvas’s edge. She deceptively leads you to the possibility of a continuation on another panel. As viewers we have been duped; the characters that lure us into Berkenblit’s paintings are not there for a laugh, but the vehicle for a story about the depths of painting itself. In particular she challenges our expectations of the comic form by filling her characters with something that notoriously make us all uncomfortable: abstract painting. Berkenblit’s mastery of black paint (varying its hues and textures), allows her to explore the tension between its absence and presence. The magic continues in her search for light to bring us out of the darkness, both thematically and in paint.

The exhibition features three of Berkenblit’s recent paintings: Flower Circus, 2022; Light Bulb Lane, 2022; and Fireman’s Carnival, 2019, shown alongside a series of recent gouache drawings.  On view in the adjacent screening room is Ellen Berkenblit’s film "Lines Roar" (2018); a window into her process, focusing on the dynamic nature of Berkenblit’s line.

Born in Paterson, NJ, Berkenblit went on to receive her BFA from Cooper Union in 1980. Her work can be found in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, the Cincinnati Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She is also the recipient a 2014 Guggenheim fellowship. Ellen Berkenblit is represented by Anton Kern Gallery in New York, Vielmetter in Los Angeles and Corbett & Dempsey in Chicago.