Elizabeth Glaessner, Asami Shoji, Oda Iselin Sønderland

François Ghebaly New York is proud to present a three-person exhibition featuring the work of Elizabeth Glaessner, Asami Shoji, and Oda Iselin Sønderland.

Artists Elizabeth Glaessner, Asami Shoji, and Oda Iselin Sønderland draw from overlapping reservoirs of symbolism and inspiration. Folklore, mythic parable, popular culture, and psychoanalytic thought, as well as illustration traditions and wider art histories form a library of touchstones from which each artist synthesizes their unique pictorial and narrative universe. 

Their latest three-person exhibition brings together new oil and watercolor paintings, and focuses on continuities in their vivid, kaleidescopic imagemaking. Common between their individual approaches is a layered, deeply psychological exploration of dichotomy. Boundaries between self and other, interior and exterior, and narrator and recollection, as well as bodily and spatial thresholds are continually proposed and dissolved in their works. The resulting effect is one of tension, holding in suspense the narrative and psychic consequences of their respective scenes in ways that enrich their portrayals of fantasy, memory, haunting, and the subconscious.

New York-based artist Elizabeth Glaessner (b. 1984, Palo Alto, USA) creates vibrant, multi-layered pictorial universes in her paintings. Cast in chromatic swathes of hot and cool, Glaessner’s amorphous figures, evocative poses, and surreal environments blend art historical reference and cultural observation into paintings that pose more questions than answers. Glaessner embraces improvisation in her work as a way to counter the authority of moral imagery or dogmatic narrative. Often beginning by pouring preliminary colors on a flat surface, Glaessner allows stochastic mark-making and loose, liquid shapes to form the underpinnings of scenes in which figures and landscapes are in constant metamorphosis, challenging the limits of interpretation.

Glaessner lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BA from Trinity University and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Recent solo exhibitions include Perrotin, Tokyo; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; PPOW, New York; and Le Consortium, Dijon. Selected group exhibitions include FLAG Art Foundation, New York; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; Kasmin Gallery, New York; and Make Room, Los Angeles.

Asami Shoji (b. 1988, Fukishima, Japan) is a rising star on the Japanese contemporary art scene. Her paintings explore the murky relationship between Eros and Thanatos—love and destruction. Her figures, often shown with exaggerated limbs, expressive faces, and seemingly transparent bodies, emerge from a haze of colors and symbols that point toward internal vistas of conflicted emotion and unconscious drive.

Shoji received her MFA from Tama Art University in Tokyo. In addition to solo exhibitions at Semiose in Paris and Linseed Projects in Shanghai, Shoji’s work has been featured in numerous institutional exhibitions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kanagawa; Ashikaga Museum of Art, Tochigi; Kurume City Art Museum, Fukuoka; and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo. She was awarded the FACE Grand Prize in 2019 and an Emerging Artist Award at the Gotoh Memorial Cultural Awards in 2020.

In her figurative watercolor paintings, artist Oda Iselin Sønderland (b. 1996, Oslo, Norway) draws on personal experiences and storytelling traditions from Norway and other cultures. Her delicate, finely-detailed scenes are often inhabited by magical folk creatures and characters reminiscent of Japanese anime illustration, a lasting source of inspiration for Sønderland. Exaggerated perspectives, pictures within pictures, and figures in the throes of metamorphosis are recurring motifs in Sønderland’s work, which she uses to explore ideas around adolescence, embodiment, dreams, and the natural world.

Sønderland holds a BA from The National Academy of Art in Oslo, and an MA in painting from The Royal College of Art in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Nevven Gallery, Bologna; Galerie Pangée, Montreal; Nevven Gallery, Gothenburg; and Gallery Golsa, Oslo. Group exhibitions include Glasshouse; London; 1969 Gallery, New York; Arsenal Contemporary, Toronto; and Galerie Pangée, Montreal.