Press Release

Mrs. is pleased to announce our participation in the Independent Art Fair 2024, with works by Elizabeth Atterbury; on view at Spring Studios in New York, New York, May 9 - 12, 2024.

Elizabeth Atterbury's artistic practice is immersed in a realm of contemplation, meditation, and evolution. Her process extends far beyond the physical act of making, encompassing moments of reflection, reinvention and a nuanced interrogation of personal history, cultural heritage, and the transformative potential of objects.

Through her use of materials like sanded peach pits fashioned into strands reminiscent of prayer beads, Atterbury engages in repetitive and automatic gestures, allowing ideas to incubate and grow organically. This meditative process permeates her wall works, constructed meticulously from cut plywood and raked with tile mortar, linear and clean, while blurring boundaries and casting monochromatic shadows. In pieces like Fourth Fan and Peanut IV, Atterbury delves into the depths of memory and familial legacy, utilizing cherished artifacts as starting points for sculptural endeavors. The enlargement of mundane objects such as a hand-sized fan to larger than life proportions, Fourth Fan underscores Atterbury's keen sensitivity to the intersection between the intimate and the monumental, reminiscent of the ethos of Pop art. Yet, despite the scale, Atterbury maintains a delicate equilibrium between the autobiographical and the abstract, preserving individual narratives while allowing space for broader interpretations. Similarly, in Peanut IV, the oversized cherrywood peanut shell containing intertwined bittersweet branches, tipped with graphite, becomes a vessel for exploring themes of childhood, loss, and identity, serving as a poignant reminder of the artist's familial ties.

Throughout her practice, Atterbury, whose Chinese American mother died young, has often returned to the fractured, interrupted narratives of her family as focal points in her work, beginning with her great-great grandfather, Wang Yirong, a scholar, calligrapher, and expert in ancient Chinese texts. He was first to identify oracle bones (second millennium BCE) – incised cow scapulae and tortoise plastrons – as tools of pyromantic divination and the earliest forms of Chinese writing. His scholarship ended in 1900 with the Boxer Rebellion, after which he committed suicide by jumping down a well, with his wife. (Their children were left with relatives, a thread that leads to Atterbury’s life.) Atterbury has made multiple works, ranging widely in scale and materials, that imagine this well, physically and symbolically. Most recently, in Stone Chop 5 (Inverted Well), a large-scale granite sculpture of a handheld seal, Atterbury placed 5 oracle bone fragments into the sculpture’s base as part of the piece, though hidden from view. She asks: “Can lost, interrupted, and broken stories—or the remnants from their various disappearances—regain meaning, retain it, or stumble back into it?” Through her multidimensional approach to object-making and remaking, Atterbury invites viewers to embark on a journey of introspection, exploring the interplay between the tangible and the immaterial, the visible and the concealed.

Elizabeth Atterbury (born 1982, West Palm Beach, FL) lives and works in Portland, Maine. She received her BA from Hampshire College and her MFA from MassArt.  Recent solo and group shows include Mrs., Maspeth, NY; Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY; The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; The Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville ME; DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL; Western Exhibitions, Chicago, IL; Et al., San Francisco, CA; Able Baker Contemporary, Portland, ME; TSA, Brooklyn NY; Bodega, Philadelphia, PA/New York, NY; and The ICA at Maine College of Art, Portland, ME; among others. Recent institutional group exhibitions include Mirages, at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum at Flagler College, St. Augustine, FL; Spatial Relations, at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME; The New England Triennial at the deCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, as well as a solo exhibition at Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA from February 2023 - January 2024. Atterbury’s work resides in the permanent collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME and Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME, among others.

Atterbury is represented by Mrs., Maspeth, NY and DOCUMENT, Chicago, IL.

For more information please contact hello@mrsgallery.com.

Press

When Will the Independent Art Fair Grow Up
Hakim Bishara, Hyperallergic