If, as the saying goes, patience is a virtue, the artist Elisheva Biernoff must be as virtuous as they come. Her painting technique requires a staggering amount of focus: Using old photographs of strangers she sources from eBay and antique stores, she painstakingly re-creates the images at a one-to-one scale—front and back—in tiny brushstrokes atop paper-thin plywood. She works on one painting at a time, and each takes three or four months to complete.
“They’re sort of…all-consuming,” the San Fransisco–based Biernoff, 45, says. She only makes about a handful of paintings per year. “I like living with one of them, having that bond.”
Biernoff developed her idiosyncratic approach out of a love of other people’s photographs, which she began exploring in college at Yale, where she was pre-med while also studying art. (“I thought that I could be a doctor that made art,” she says. An agonizing organic chemistry class proved otherwise, and art prevailed.)
In 2009, the year she got her MFA from the California College of the Arts, she was invited to design a window for the San Francisco Art Commission’s Art in Storefronts initiative. Biernoff asked people in the neighborhood to submit family photos, which she’d replicate using paint for her installation. The result was like a community living room wall, filled with all the intimacy of a photo album but elevated by the hyperattention her painting process demands. Making art this way brought her closer to people and places that were otherwise not known to her. She was hooked.
Since then she’s had solo shows in California (notably at the prestigious Fraenkel Gallery, which represents her), Nevada, and Canada. Now she can add New York to that list, with the recent opening of “Elsewhere,” her first solo show on the East Coast, at David Zwirner gallery’s elegant Upper East Side town house (a fitting setting for artworks based on family photos).
The show is like a mini retrospective, with 27 works spanning from 2011 to 2025. Alongside the paintings of old photographs is a newer work called Road Not Taken (2024), Biernoff’s recent exploration of the trompe l’oeil. Its nine component paintings look like paint-by-number kits—“living room art,” as Biernoff says—but in fact they have been worked over quite meticulously by hand. Even the wood grain of the frames is the artist’s doing.
Elisheva Biernoff, Advent, 2025. © Elisheva Biernoff. Courtesy of David Zwirner.Photo: Kerry McFate