Elise Adibi is an abstract painter, and also creates installations and writes essays. Her paintings are a collaboration with natural processes and materials. The organic materials that Adibi has been using for many years include, raw canvas, rabbit skin glue (an animal protein), graphite (a form of carbon), urine (supplied by her own metabolism), oil paint and plant oils distilled from plants.

Her use of essential plant oils mixed with her paint lead her to explore the idea of plant communication through painting. She created a 6-month installation of plants and oil paintings in the greenhouse built by the industrialist and art collector, Henry Clay Frick, at The Frick in Pittsburgh titled Respiration Paintings (2017). After the exhibition she wrote Subtle Affinity published in Forty-Five: A Journal for Outdoor Research (2019).

Her first exhibition of paintings using plant oils was Metabolic Paintings (2013) at The Radcliffe Institute, where she also designed an architectural aromatic installation by building a floor scented with plant oils. Other solo exhibitions include Respiration Paintings at Full Haus in Los Angeles (2016), Substance at Louis B. James in New York (2014), Da Capo at Churner and Churner in New York (2012) and A Priori at Southfirst in Brooklyn (2010). In 2018 she created an outdoor installation at Allegheny College called The Outermost Painting: the presence of life sustains life. In 2011 she made oxidation paintings for an exhibition at The Andy Warhol Museum and the Armory Focus (2013). In 2010 she curated Gold in Braddock. Along with being a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2013-14), she has also been a fellow at The Terra Foundation in Giverny France (2007). Adibi’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, ArtPulse, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, The Boston Globe and The Harvard Crimson among other publications.

Press for APRIORI 2010 at Southfirst

“in a tightly focused hang, (Adibi) presented nine abstractions nakedly shorn of appropriative conceit, and let them stand for themselves…. In Adibi’s work, the grid is generally the foundation for the patterns that happen through its tracery, and her adherence to it frequently remains evident, even prepossessing, in its formalism. But—owing to her application of multiple paint layers and the deeply idiosyncratic exigencies of human accident—physical imperfections, miscalculations and misalignments predominate.” 

— Suzanne Hudson, Artforum, February 2011

Press for RESPIRATION PAINTINGS at The Frick Pittsburgh, 2017

… once entered, the greenhouse is transformed into a hothouse of radiant color and sensory indulgence. Adibi has filled both wings of the greenhouse with a precise display of eighteen canvasses punctuated with floral and herbal plantings, chosen to complement the paintings in color and fragrance. Mostly thirty inches square, the eighteen canvasses stand to attention on raised planters, two larger pieces at either end of each wing, all bathed in a grid of fenestrated sunlight. Judd-like in their precision, intervals and repetition, the exactitude of the presentation suggests the rigorous inquiry of a laboratory, an observation strengthened by the presence of an unexpected pungent and unknowable mix of scent. Floral and herbal notes emanate from the plants, but from the canvasses a more alchemical, exotic blend suggests a carpenter’s wood shop, or maybe a Middle Eastern bazaar. Supermoon Painting 2016, for example, has materials listed as: rabbit skin glue, oil paint and lemon, cardamom, sandalwood, jasmine, and neroli essential plant oils. 

— Tim Hadfield, ArtPulse, 2018

Photo credit: Violet Hopkins