{"id":237100,"date":"2026-01-14T07:22:11","date_gmt":"2026-01-14T07:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/237100\/"},"modified":"2026-01-14T07:22:11","modified_gmt":"2026-01-14T07:22:11","slug":"in-elisheva-biernoffs-paintings-a-pictures-worth-two-thousand-hours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/237100\/","title":{"rendered":"In Elisheva Biernoff\u2019s Paintings, a Picture\u2019s Worth Two Thousand Hours"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2014front and back\u2014in tiny brushstrokes atop paper-thin plywood. She works on one painting at a time, and each takes three or four months to complete.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re sort of\u2026all-consuming,\u201d the San Fransisco\u2013based Biernoff, 45, says. She only makes about a handful of paintings per year. \u201cI like living with one of them, having that bond.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biernoff developed her idiosyncratic approach out of a love of other people\u2019s photographs, which she began exploring in college at Yale, where she was pre-med while also studying art. (\u201cI thought that I could be a doctor that made art,\u201d she says. An agonizing organic chemistry class proved otherwise, and art prevailed.)<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Art in Storefronts initiative. Biernoff asked people in the neighborhood to submit family photos, which she\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n

Since then she\u2019s had solo shows in California (notably at the prestigious Fraenkel Gallery<\/a>, which represents her), Nevada<\/a>, and Canada<\/a>. Now she can add New York to that list, with the recent opening of \u201cElsewhere,\u201d<\/a> her first solo show on the East Coast, at David Zwirner<\/a> gallery\u2019s elegant Upper East Side town house (a fitting setting for artworks based on family photos).<\/p>\n

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\u2019s recent exploration of the trompe l\u2019oeil. Its nine component paintings look like paint-by-number kits\u2014\u201cliving room art,\u201d as Biernoff says\u2014but in fact they have been worked over quite meticulously by hand. Even the wood grain of the frames is the artist\u2019s doing.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/p>\n

Elisheva Biernoff, Advent, 2025. \u00a9 Elisheva Biernoff. Courtesy of David Zwirner.Photo: Kerry McFate<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If, as the saying goes, patience is a virtue, the artist Elisheva Biernoff must be as virtuous as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237101,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46,45884,9157,5101],"class_list":{"0":"post-237100","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel","16":"tag-storytypereporting","17":"tag-textabovecenterfullbleed","18":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}