Elise Engler

Interviews by Brainard Carey

Elise Engler’s art ranges from the personal to the political, to various combinations of those elements. Her work consists of meticulous, highly pictorial drawings and paintings that capture and document the material world in all its myriad details. Her projects are large in scope, but often intimate in format, and are a narrative investigation of the world seen through its innumerable, but countable, individual components, assembled in suites and series of works.

Engler has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in drawing, and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant in painting. She has been the recipient of two MacDowell residencies, a Yaddo fellowship and a fellowship at Civatella Ranieri, In Umbria, Italy. She spent 2 months in Antarctica as an awardee of a National Science Foundation Antarctica Artists and Writers Grant. Her work has been written about in Art in America, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among other publications, and she has shown in galleries across the U.S. and in Europe. Her project, A Year on Broadway, was featured on CBS Sunday Morning. Her book, A Diary of the Plague Year: An Illustrated Chronicle of 2020, Metropolitan Books/ Henry Holt/ MacMillan) was published in 2022. Engler lives and works in New York City.

Box Camera, 2024 Oil on panel, 6 x 7 x 1 1/2 in 15.2 x 17.8 x 3.8 cm.

January 6, 2021, 2023 Oil on canvas, 62 x 52 in 157.5 x 132.1 cm

Homage to Florine Stettheimer’s Cathedral of Art, 2024 Oil on panel, 5 x 6 x 1 1/2 in 12.7 x 15.2 x 3.8 cm