Eleanor Aldrich

PROM HAIR - Textured Oil Painting w/ Scene of a Girl Preparing for Prom

2022

Eleanor Aldrich was born in Springerville, Arizona. A participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, she also holds an MFA in Painting & Drawing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she currently lives. She earned her BFA in Painting & Drawing through the Academie Minerva (Groningen, the Netherlands) and Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff. She was a participant in the Drawing Center’s first Open Sessions, and works in a long-distance collaboration ALDRICH & WEISSBERGER with the artist Barbara Weissberger. Eleanor has had solo shows in Boston, Nashville, Knoxville, Flagstaff, AZ, and at the University of Alabama. Her work has been shown at Saltworks Gallery and White Space (Atlanta, GA), the Drawing Center (New York, NY), Grin (Providence, RI) and Ortega y Gasset (New York, NY). Her work was chosen for 1708 Gallery’s ‘FEED 2013’ (Richmond, VA). She has been awarded an Endowment for the Arts through the Whiteman Foundation, and the Herman E. Spivey Fellowship. Her work has been included in New American Paintings, and reviewed in Art in America and on Artforum. Statement: My work is about the places where the concerns of modernist painting meet my own experiences and the physical reality of the body. Sometimes the encounter is in the application – paint is combed, piped, squished, and sprayed, and paper transfers are rubbed off; playing with ideas of femininity and the purity of paint. The material squeeze invites the empathy of the body and is at times funny, beautiful, revolting, and satisfying. The grid appears as a support- a resist that molds the material as it presses through. In this way the material is metaphoric of conformity and issues of control over one’s body.