About
Elizabeth Briel is a painter and printmaker who works primarily with paper as a response to where she lives - printing directly from architecture, making paper from linen and cotton textiles, and creating large-scale modular paper installations. Her work begins with materials imbued with meaning—papers devastated by a typhoon or made of military uniforms, paints of bone and lead. Born in California and raised in Minneapolis (BFA Painting, University of MN) and having lived in NYC and Boston before leaving the US in 2003, she lived in Asia for two decades and now works from a studio in Paris. She has exhibited in Europe, Asia and Australia, and returns to Asia for annual projects.
Artists Statement
I make art about where I am: geographically, emotionally, historically. My art is made with light, time, and chance, capturing the sun's UV rays or wind and a sensation of belonging nowhere yet anywhere. As an immigrant, I am outside looking in, buffeted by partially-understood languages and cultural norms, often welcomed, sometimes tolerated, never accepted. This interior/exterior duality makes its way into many of my artworks. Visual influences include American abstraction and conceptions of negative space from various artforms of China and Japan.
Many works begin in modular fashion. Via repetition of process or form they become flexible, site-specific installations, breaking through standard rectangular formats of painting/printmaking to wrap around walls and transform space. In recent years my approach has been to view architecture as a matrix: instead of printing with machines, or creating printing plates for reproduction, I print directly from the city itself: its windows, walls, and grates, where light and atmosphere permeate the boundaries we create between interior and exterior lives.