Lot 463 - Eleanor Ekserdjian - New Green

Oil on paper
2024
A6 (10x15cm)
Original Artwork
Signed on Verso
Curated by Hannah Tilson

About
Eleanor Ekserdjian is a painter and film artist. Ekserdjian’s practice involves projecting the moving image onto paper or canvas and drawing from and over it, her physical and emotional responses being made visible through rapid mark-making. These paintings and drawings become lyrical landscapes which explore her evolving emotional response to the film. Her most recent film and painting series was made during a six-week artist residency in Armenia, and explores cultural memory through landscape. Pepe Karmel, author of 'Abstract Art: A Global History', defined her work as ‘Poetic, elegant and mysterious — a kinetic, subjective transcription of the world into calligraphy.’

Education
2021
Drawing Intensive, Royal Drawing School, London, UK

2014-2019
MA Fine Art, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

Solo Exhibitions
2025
Interwoven, Messums London, London, UK

2023
Light Pictures, Seen Fifteen Gallery, London, UK

Group Exhibitions
2024
Crosscurrents Armenia | London, Redfern Gallery, London, UK

2023
International Diaspora Exhibition, Armenian Centre for Contemporary Experimental Art, Yerevan, Armenia

2022
Imagined Landscapes, Yerevan Im Ser Foundation, Yerevan, Armenia
Emergence, AMP Gallery, London, UK

2021
Light & Line, Gallery 286, London, UK
Royal Drawing School Selection, Hoxton 253, London, UK
Summer Exhibition, The Gallery at Green & Stone, London, UK

2020
Spectral Pathways, Hidden Door Arts Festival, Edinburgh, UK

Awards
2024
Hauser & Wirth Residency, Braemar, UK
Sokyo Gallery Residency, Kyoto, Japan

2022
Yerevan Im Ser Foundation Residency, Yerevan, Armenia

Statement about AOAP Submitted Artwork
This series of works came out of my experience of growing up in Britain with a curiosity about Armenia and about my family who left Constantinople in the early 20th century. In 2022, I travelled to Armenia for the first time as a part of an artists’ residency programme - the paintings I made there represented the first sight of a place I had always imagined but had never seen.

‘They Will Not Take My Island III’ is a response to the power of the Armenian Landscape and its glowing colour. The title refers to Arshile Gorky’s drawing ‘They Will Take My Island’ and this work echoes his response to the loss of his homeland of Van. ‘Red Nocturne’ and ‘New Green’ were made on my return and combine the landscapes of both the UK and Armenia. I am interested in the idea of simultaneous landscape.