The American artist Elizabeth Glaessner was born in Palo Alto, California, and grew up in Houston, Texas, where her mother, also a painter and an art teacher, encouraged her children’s creativity. Elizabeth received her Bachelor of Fine Art from Trinity University in San Antonio in Texas, and her Masters from the New York Academy of Art, where she received a post-graduate fellowship in 2013. She now lives and works in New York City.

Glaessner uses water-dispersed pigment and inks in her absorbing, vibrant scenes and portraits. Her paintings, shifting between reality and dreamlike settings, explore humans in all their imperfect forms, including elements from nature, mythology, and her own personal experiences. She works with different painting processes and techniques to build on a personal narrative drawing on memory, ritual, contemporary culture, art history, cultural myths and folklore, constantly moving between figuration and abstraction but always using colour as the language.

New York’s PPOW Gallery, which represents her work, describes it like this: ‘Glaessner’s brightly hued paintings teem with life, drawing on personal history, memory and ritual, both real and imagined. They depict a utopian, surreal universe, featuring theatrical and celebratory figures that blur the line between myth and reality. She has had a long-time fascination with the way ancient societies immortalised their leaders through the repetition of stories passed down orally and visually through depictions on murals and objects, often resulting in exaggerated and performative figures.’ Elizabeth Glaessner’s work is a quintessential mix of beauty and fear. It is easy to get drawn into her works with their striking colours and compositions, but what keeps the attention are the dark motifs that appear on the surface. Patterns and figures that at once seem familiar take on an eerie, other-worldly feel.

We are very grateful to our Russian friend Yuri for suggesting the inclusion of this artist, and for supplying most of the images.