LOS ANGELES, CA.- parrasch heijnen is opening dream song, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Hudson, NY-based artist Ellen Siebers (b. 1986, Madison, WI).

Using poetic washes of abstraction, Siebers memorializes the immediacy of beauty in vignettes of daily life. She envisions indistinct but familiar verses, through a duality of sensation and perception. In these gentle scenes, the simultaneity of what is felt and observed is conveyed together yet distinctly apart.

Siebers gives breath to the temporal phenomena of her subjects with fluid compositions on panel. Any distinction between sight and impression is blurred by the artist’s languid brushstrokes. Intimately scaled yet uninhibited, the works capture a quality of lightness held within a fleeting moment.

In Apples in May, 2023, a field of vision fades in and out of focus as soft boundaries gently suggest form. Using cathartic gestures, Siebers composes still life arrangements which shine with fractals of light. The Double Red Sun (2023), spawned from thick atmospheric smoke due to ongoing northern wildfires, is a direct reminder of the unconstrained interconnectedness of our environment. The view remains as an impression, with painterly preservation.

Small windows open onto concurrent nested scenes, frequently depicting a nude figure in a moment of repose. The character acts as a placeholder, crystallizing moments, to visually superimpose oneself within introspective stills. Illuminating the sleeping figure within, a tonal field surrounds a preserved frame in Blue Sleep, 2023. The enveloping abstraction appears as a sensory landscape, echoing hues of the enclosed scene. The artist renders her figures tenderly, with a dimensionality unique to their interior realms.

As she encounters the world, Siebers catalogues each sensation, measuring color, vibrancy, temperature and motion. This extension of present wonderment is transposed into her vulnerable scenes by a self-reflective gaze. Capturing the ephemeral atmosphere, she weaves a new mythology of beauty where her subjects are granted the gravity of their own cosmos.

Ellen Siebers (b. 1986, Madison, WI) is a painter based in Hudson, NY. She received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008 and her MFA from the University of Iowa in 2012. Siebers was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Grant (2023), Vermont Studio Center Grant (2014), the University of Iowa Quarter-time Teaching Assistantship (2009-12), the Iowa Quarter-time Fellowship (2009), and the Mildred Pelzer Lynch Fellowship (2011-12). Her recent solo and group exhibitions include: A Particular Kind of Heaven, curated by Ali Dipp at parrasch heijnen (Los Angeles, CA); Harper’s Gallery (East Hampton, NY); Frosch & Portmann (New York, NY); MARCH, New York, NY; Sardine (Brooklyn, NY); Proto Gallery (Hoboken, NJ); Big Medium (Austin, TX); The Provincial (MI); Deanna Evans Projects (Brooklyn, NY); FJORD Gallery (Philadelphia, PA); Collective 131 (Brooklyn, NY); Pt. II Gallery (Oakland, CA); and Peep Projects (Philadelphia, PA).

parrasch heijnen
Ellen Siebers: dream song
August 26th, 2023 – October 7th, 2023
Artist Reception: Saturday August 26 from 6-8p