For 40 years now, Ellen Berkenblit has been returning with stoic passion and meticulousness to the main protagonist of her paintings, a usually grim-looking female figure in profile. Berkenblit does not see herself as a storyteller or biographer of this figure. Instead, appearing in various constellations and scenarios, the figure serves the artist as a matrix of endless painterly possibilities, dissolving any dichotomy between figuration and abstraction in the process.
Ellen Berkenblit was born in 1958 in Paterson, New Jersey. She currently lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited across the USA, with her most recent solo exhibitions including Ellen Berkenblit: In Motion at the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque (2023), Norton at Anton Kern Gallery in New York (2023), Ellen Berkenblit: Other Shapes at Night at Vielmetter Los Angeles (2022), and Atrium Project: Ellen Berkenblit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2019). Berkenblit’s work is part of the public collections at MoMA, New York, the Brooklyn Museum, MOCA, Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2014, she was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.
