Elisabeth Condon was born in Los Angeles, CA and currently lives and works in between New York and Tampa, FL. Condon is known for her multilayered poured paintings which combine her appreciation of LA’s 70s glam rock scene, her mother’s vintage wallpaper and cues from Chinese scrolls to create her unique abstractions.
Condon’s paintings, collages and drawings share a collective theme of poured paint to illustrate movement, a technique she refers to as an identifier of her work. She prefers pouring, splattering, or pressing paint to have unpredicted results, instead of using just a paintbrush. Condon’s work is often described as a cross between scenic landscapes and colorful abstractions in increasingly multi-layered compositions.
“I use a mixture of all these types of visual alphabets. Screen-printing from the 60s and 70s, hand pouring which has its antiquity, wallpaper patterns from early printing days, all the processes I’m interested in in one compacted space.”
THE GRAPHICSTUDIO MONOPRINTS
Condon explains where her inspiration for the monoprints with Graphicstudio sparked from. “I’m really inspired by land that I’ve lived in and traveled to. It’s almost a kinesthetic relationship. It informs my sense of scale, the way I perceive lines. It’s a way to create a map of consciousness.” Combining elements of wallpaper with etchings of crudely drawn plates, viewers begin to notice the elements of landscape Condon saw in her time in China as well as the infamous pigeons of her New York City home and the patterns seen in sidewalks walking through the city.
As for her use of her mother’s wallpaper, Condon explains, the more familiar she becomes with a pattern the easier it becomes to riff on them. At Graphicstudio, chine collé elements became the way of patterning.
Elisabeth Condon is represented by Lesley Heller Gallery in New York and Emerson Dorsch Gallery in Miami. She received her BFA from the Otis Art Institute at Parsons School of Design and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Condon held tenure at the University of South Florida from 2003 to 2014. Condon’s paintings are held in the collections of the Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL; United States Foundation of Art in Embassies Program, Beijing; and JP Morgan Chase. She is the recipient of the 2018 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Program Grant, a 2015 New York PULSE Prize, Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship. Her work has been featured in publications including Hyperallergic, The New York Times, the Miami Herald, The New York Sun and Artcritical.