Elizabeth Cooper’s paintings are exploratory and experimental and proof that gestural abstraction can still look fresh more than fifty years after the dawn of Abstract Expressionism. Her paintings all begin the same way – a flat, monochromatic application of paint over the entire canvas, a la Ellsworth Kelly’s Specturm V at the Metropolitan Museum. Cooper then pours, splashes, and splatters paint onto the surface of the canvas, creating abstractions that straddle into the realm of representational. This perhaps can be attributed to Cooper’s choice of palette – hothouse colors, which once poured, can take on the life of their own, like a Rorschach test come alive on a candied enamel ground.

Elizabeth Cooper received her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA from Columbia University. She received The Pollock Krasner Award and completed her residencies from The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation and P.S 1/MoMA Museum. Cooper currently lives and works in New York City.