White Room: Ella Kruglyanskaya

White Columns is proud to present a solo exhibition of recent paintings by the New York-based artist Ella Kruglyanskaya.

Working in both oil on canvas and egg tempera on wooden panels, Kruglyanskaya’s work is underscored by a sardonic wit, and invokes a complex lineage, a seemingly inexhaustible set of departure points and aesthetic detours that might include Magritte’s ‘period vache’, the theatrical designs of Alexandra Exter, the 1980s work of Elvira Bach, the late paintings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Russ Meyer’s voluptuous imagination, various manifestations of pulp illustration, as well as her own unapologetic embrace of comic-book stylings.

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Writing about her work Kruglyanskaya has said:

“The subject of my recent paintings is the female figure and its accoutrements. I engage self-reflexively with the feminine image in graphic/ comical ways. I’m interested in non-narrative pictorial events that aspire to a unspoken punchline. The figure functions as the space onto which an often wise-cracking tableau occurs. The inanimate objects become character-like and interact in a set up or scene from a painted reality. The women’s faces are often obscured or rendered in a comic-book sensibility. I feel the need to “collapse” the figure and allow it to teeter on the edge of abstraction so I can focus on shapes and colors on the surface of the figures which also happens to be the surface of the painting itself.”

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Ella Kruglyanskaya received her BFA at Cooper Union in 2001, and her MFA at Yale School of Art in 2006. This is her first solo exhibition in New York. In 2009-2010 she took part in the Artist in Residence studio program at the Henry Street Settlement/Abrons Art Center, New York.