Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Elise Asher: The Vintage Years, Paintings of the 1950s and 60s. This is the first exhibition in New York to survey Elise Asher’s early paintings. In this period, Asher (1912–2004) incorporated calligraphic handwriting and text into clouds of color and brushwork. The personal style of these linear abstractions was Asher’s unique contribution to the post-War abstraction. Asher was also a noted poet who published three volumes of poetry in 1955, 1994, and 2000.  This exhibition serves to re-introduce Asher’s work, which is both historically significant, and also feels fresh and newly relevant as many contemporary painters utilize the combination of text and image.

Asher studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and later graduated from the Simmons School of Social Work in Boston, MA. Following her graduation, Asher settled into her first marriage in Rochester, NY, but felt stifled by suburban life. In 1947, she and her young daughter Babette left Rochester for the Village in New York City. Using her daughter’s poster paints, Asher began making Miro-esque works on shirt boards and drawing paper. Her social circles included poets E.E. Cummings and William Carlos Williams, and she attended readings at the YMHA poetry center on 92nd Street.

At the end of 1948, she was introduced by mutual friends to the painter Nanno de Groot. They took a long trip together to Big Sur, where Asher drew inspiration from the dramatic and strange landscape and continued her story-telling painting style with poster paints. They enjoyed spending time there with novelist Henry Miller. She and de Groot were married in 1949. They would spend their summers in Provincetown, MA, where her neighbor was the painter and celebrated teacher Hans Hofmann. Back in New York in the early 1950s, she and de Groot became involved with the legendary artist-run space, the Tanager Gallery. This would be the site of Asher’s first solo exhibition in 1953.

In the 1960s, Asher began experimenting with plexiglass as the support for her paintings, rather than canvas. Almost by chance, she started painting on an old-fashioned cookie jar, painting the jar both inside and outside. This piece was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in an exhibition called Greetings, alongside Saul Steinberg’s faux phonograph records. She made transparent book structures composed of acrylic leaves fanning out from spiral binding. The pages filled with her illegible calligraphic brushwork. When closed, the transparent layers intermingle.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Asher returned to canvas, making suggestive, metaphysical landscapes and scenes populated by recurring motifs of clocks, locks, keys, tombs, marshlands, strange birds, and other creatures.

Asher referred to her paintings as emanating from poetry. Lines of text are “jumping-off points, parts of a text that makes music for me and extend the life of the poem.” She stated, “I try to translate the poetry of existence, its beauty and its terror, into a vocabulary of the visual imagination.” Many of her poems correspond to the titles of her paintings.