PRESS RELEASE FROM AMERICAN FOLK ART:
Elli Ali: Memoirs
Paintings Spanning 1997-2016
August 4- 24th, 2016
Show Online: Tuesday August 2, 2016
In the Gallery: Thursday August 4, 2016
Opening Reception: First Friday August, 5th 5-8 pmEllie Ali, is a self-taught powerhouse of a modernist painter, who, for years supported herself from the sale of her artwork – even selling in the streets of Soho, NYC in the 1990’s
Incorporating Chinese ink, tempera, oil pastels, acrylics, graphite and her fertile imagination, Ms. Ali uses minimal strokes often layered over geometric fields of color to create paintings rife with motion and emotion. Her sojourns have taken her across the globe; her artwork reflects a worldly improvisational style. Using rhythmic lines and syncopated shadings, figures are often caught in a jazz-like groove. Faces thoughtful, not posed. Adding to the textural landscape of each painting, she calls the papers she collects, and paints upon, her co-conspirators. A decade ago, Betsey-Rose Weiss, owner of American Folk Art, was introduced to Ellie Ali: I was captured, and went about the task of representing her. It took ten years to make that representation a reality”. Ms. Ali, entering her late sixties, had decided it was time to seek out gallery representation.
This show, entitled ‘Memoirs’ are paintings Ellie had been saving, she does not know for what exactly…from the 1990’s through today. These paintings represent a visual journey of her life, each are memories along the way, presenting the arc of her career and provoking a range of emotions. Ellie Ali’s personal Memoirs in painted form: evocative and mysterious.
American Folk will open the show at WWW.AMERIFOLK.COM at noon on August 2nd.
The show will open in the gallery at 64 Biltmore Ave, downtown, at 10 am Thursday, August 4th.
A reception will be held in the gallery First Friday, August 5th from 5 – 8pm, 2016.
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