Lars Elling: Palimpsest

by Lars Elling (Artist), Joshua Ferris (Introduction)

“Any painter who realizes the relation between the gesture the hand and brush makes and the imitation of life it leaves on the canvas,” Norwegian painter Lars Elling (born 1966) has said, “will cease to see himself as a figurative painter. ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ and so forth.” Elling’s citation of Magritte is not incidental. In Elling’s large canvases, as in the work of the Belgian Surrealist, human bodies rarely take entirely conventional forms. Rather, their faces and limbs melt into nonfigurative elements--atmosphere, blurred color, scrubbed-out regions of neutral tint--gesturing toward a broader horizon, nodding at persona and narrative while ultimately frustrating any drive toward coherence or story. Palimpsest collects Elling’s paintings from the decade 2000–2010 and includes an essay by acclaimed novelist Joshua Ferris, author of the PEN/Hemingway Award winner and National Book Award finalist Then We Came to the End and The Unnamed .

200 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2010