ARTIST STATEMENT

Diana Ellinger’s painting practice explores abstraction. Her process-driven work is a patchwork of methodologies and modes of thinking that weave together pockets of repurposed abstract expressionism with her own constructed painterly systems. Anti-compositional strategies – use of ready-made marks, colour and erasure combined with the subconscious working of gestural art – make Ellinger’s paintings complex.  

Ellinger wants to re-do gestural art, but on her own terms finding ways to use the material honestly and playfully. Her paintings work themselves out. Their process makes them. Deep layering affords the viewer a kind of archaeological dig through an entanglement of forms obliterated and then revealed. Buried brushwork scars the surface, reappearing layers later. This is where the ready-made elements – poured paint, found marks, geometric shapes – come into compositional play. 

Colour is important. Ellinger works with a collection of mixed colours that she names – bored grey, garage pink, nico green, and so on – each one like an old friend to call upon when needed, each with its own weight, personality and function. Slippages in their exact make-up sneak into the work, a type of automatism dictated by memory, quietly but surely influencing process. Ellinger uses proximity of colours and the push and pull of light and dark to build uncanny spaces where forms weave, pulse and hum.

Chance and movement through the application of paint and its removal, through crude shapes and the bumpiness of layered paint creates a sense of unpredictability and discovery. There is a kind of coyness of approach, one that reaches the destination indirectly via a network of unused backstreets. 

Ellinger’s art celebrates the discarded, over-looked or forgotten things. And in those things it finds beauty and puts them to use. Her working cycle is a closed-loop that flicks up dirt and settles it back down into a friable substance, extending a life, making-do, squeezing out the last drop, stitching it all together.