Ellen Phelan
Ellen Phelan is a painter and photographer known for her hazy, romantic landscapes. Throughout her long and varied career, she has worked in multiple media, including oil, watercolor, pastel, gouache, photography, stencil, and collage. In the 1960s, Phelan embraced a violent brand of abstract painting influenced by postminimalism, for which she stretched, cut, and shredded her canvases into irregular shapes and sizes. However, her work took a significant turn after she began vacationing in the Adirondack Mountains in the late 1970s: Phelan took up plein air painting, creating atmospheric, diffuse landscapes reminiscent of Corot and Turner. After experimenting with heady, psycho-dramatic portraits of dolls, she revisited landscape, this time employing photography as a model for her paintings. Her moody still-lifes, landscapes, and paintings of old family photographs have been compared to the Merchant Ivory's films and Marcel Proust's prose. In her blurry, ethereal passages, Phelan maintains a rapport with 19th century Romanticism, exploring loss, memory, and the passage of time.
She has had solo shows at the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum and has been included in group exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien, MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney …
Ellen Phelan is a painter and photographer known for her hazy, romantic landscapes. Throughout her long and varied career, she has worked in multiple media, including oil, watercolor, pastel, gouache, photography, stencil, and collage. In the 1960s, Phelan embraced a violent brand of abstract painting influenced by postminimalism, for which she stretched, cut, and shredded her canvases into irregular shapes and sizes. However, her work took a significant turn after she began vacationing in the Adirondack Mountains in the late 1970s: Phelan took up plein air painting, creating atmospheric, diffuse landscapes reminiscent of Corot and Turner. After experimenting with heady, psycho-dramatic portraits of dolls, she revisited landscape, this time employing photography as a model for her paintings. Her moody still-lifes, landscapes, and paintings of old family photographs have been compared to the Merchant Ivory's films and Marcel Proust's prose. In her blurry, ethereal passages, Phelan maintains a rapport with 19th century Romanticism, exploring loss, memory, and the passage of time.
She has had solo shows at the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum and has been included in group exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Wien, MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
MA, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
BFA, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn New York
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
The Baltimore Museum, Baltimore, MD
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert, New York, NY
Senior & Shopmaker Gallery, New York, NY
Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Ferndale, MI
