KEENE — Keene Arts will exhibit more than 25 works of Elena Borstein spanning the ‘70s-2000s in “Illuminated Architecture – A Sampling – 50 years of Architecturally Inspired Work.”
Opening Party is Saturday, July 13 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. The show closes Sunday, July 28. Keene Arts is located at 10881 State Hwy. 9N, Keene.
NOT A RETROSPECTIVE
“I don’t really consider this a retrospective,” Borstein, an Elizabethtown resident, said.
“A retrospective would be everything. I’m not borrowing back work. I don’t have the resources to do that kind of big retrospective. This is a sampling over 50 years. I have various different periods of my work, and, hopefully, I’ll make some kind of coherent order out of it so you can see how I developed from the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, 2000s. I even have some of my brand new work in it that I went down to pick up in NYC so that we can be up to date on current work.”
Her architecturally inspired works have been shown in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Hayden Museum, Everson Museum, the Neuberger Museum among others. She was also curator of and had works shown in the 2021 exhibit, “A Woman’s View – Recognizing Artists in the Adirondacks,” featured at the Adirondack History Museum in Elizabethtown, according to a press release.
Borstein’s early paintings were inspired by her interest in architecture and her love of travel. In her travels to Mexico, Greece, and other Mediterranean countries, her artistic process started with a moment of seeing: she would take thousands of photographs of the simple, country architecture, to later reinterpret with soft pastels, using almost pure pigment to simplify and redraw the complex surfaces. From the series of pastel drawings, a few are selected to be enlarged and re-created in acrylic applied by airbrush. This process involves applying many layers of paint, slowly building up to a luminous surface.
“The palette I think you will be able to see as the years go on, my palette gets brighter, more color,” she said.
“It starts out a fairly limited palette, then they get brighter over the years. The new ones, which are much more abstract, are much brighter.”
Bernstein’s process changes over the decades from photographs as references to found digital composites.
“Half of the work I think will be pastels on paper,” she said.
“That’s what I started out with is the pastel drawings. Then from that I pick a few of those on each period to do an acrylic because the acrylic takes much more time.”
GREECE
Borstein’s artistic odyssey began in her “Greek” period from 1975 to 2000s with approximately 15 paintings.
“Greece was sort of a kind of fluke,” she said.
“I was traveling about by myself and trying to have some adventures when I was a young woman. In Greece, I started to just go and get on these ferry boats they have leaving from Piraeus, the port near Athens. I would take these ferries to the different islands and just get off when something looked interesting.”
Borstein got to know many different islands that way, and she really enjoyed it.
“A lot of young people were traveling,” she said.
“This was like the ‘70s and ‘80s. A lot of people were backpacking in those days. It was very simple and cheap. I would just stay in people’s houses. It was really kind of a nice thing to do. My trips were because I love to travel and I love architecture. I combined the two things that I liked the most. That’s become sort of what my paintings are about. But the process, of course, is going to change a lot. It changes from my taking pictures myself in the early days to working more digitally and conceptually in more recent years.”
CUBA
Through the years her images have become more conceptual and abstract, but are still rooted in specific landscapes. On several trips to Cuba (1987-2000), she recorded images of time and decay within Cuba’s distinctive architecture.
The exhibition will feature a few pastels and one large painting from Cuba.
“I started going in ‘87,” she said.
“I went with a group of photographers to Cuba. I just had this opportunity to go there and take pictures. It was exciting to see this island. I’ve always heard about Cuba. I actually met a friend there who became a friend over this past 50 years. She runs this Cuban Art Space. She’s going to come up to this show, which will be kind of fun. I was just in a show, down in NYC at the Cuban Art Space. She and I have remained friends, and she’s a big supporter of Cuba and what they have been trying to do.”
In Cuba, Borstein found the architecture very distinct and in decay.
“Because they have a lot of problems to keep it up-to-date, the climate and lack of money,” she said.
“The photographs took on a different feeling, one of time and of decay in the architecture.”
INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE
Following a trip to Japan in 2007, she created paintings of buildings designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando. In 2018-19, she painted a series inspired by Mexican architect, Luis Barragan.
Recently, Borstein has begun to use digital techniques in her works – using composite imagery of various architectural works to highlight individual architectural styles, removed from their specific locales. Similar to her pastels, once the digital images were designed, they were enlarged and re-created using her acrylic airbrush technique.
Her latest work will also be featured in the Keene Arts exhibit, including her “Veils of the City” series.
“I use pictures that I find on the computer,” Borstein said.
“They’re not ones that I take myself, but I put them together. I composite them and make several images at a time. So, it becomes something different and more abstract, but it’s still suggestive of architecture, but not so clearly a particular place. It’s less realistic. More abstract.”