Elena Keller’s world contains the bright expressions of ascending movement toward the spirit and the eternal. The color and forms of her paintings excite both the eye and the mind. There is the feeling of pure joy immediately obvious in the diagrams and strokes of patterns and the well-defined textures of surface.
With the sight of these energies, which seem at play in the directness of her imagery, the sensation of this immediacy is evident as immense artistic strength. Her oil on canvas pieces are at the same time highly refined in the
expressions achieved. The realization of her designs might be perceived as a "figures on a ground" relation, but here the intricacy of the "ground" absorbs the viewer into an awareness of the space surrounding the painting as an opening into a twilit sky of geometric energies, stars, and the ethereal spectrum.
The effect of Keller’s vision is like opening a scroll of her thoughts. To her intellectual process, she is creating her own tradition of Byzantine mosaics -- the energy of her colors seem as concrete and textured as those walls. The freedom from political and social conjecture however involves a battle with disorder, symbolized in her figures and lines. To her, the variations of masculine crosses and feminine nets in her compositions relate to Penelopa who knits the brides’ dresses.
Elena Keller was born in Moscow. Since 1973, she has participated in exhibitions in Moscow, Helsinki, Poland, Hamburg, Holland, Washington and New York. Her work is included in collections in the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow; the State Kunsthalle, Hamburg; the Center of Modern Art, Berlin; the Zimmerly Art Museum in New Jersey; and in other public and private collections.
This exhibition originated at Gregory Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, New York, NY, where Ms. Keller has exhibited since 1992. She presently lives in New York City.
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