Cyclades by Elena Borstein
The exhibition titled “Elena Borstein, CYCLADES”, is being sponsored by Maliotis Cultural Center from January 14 – March 15, 2023,
We propose an exhibition of the work that started in 1974 and was shown in 21 solo exhibitions and 28 group exhibitions in the United States, but was never exhibited in Greece or in any Greek American
institution in USA.
Exhibition prepared by Constantin (Costa) Kastoris.
Original Paintings
The Exhibition
This exhibition project” Cyclades” is the result of work
Elena Borstein has done in Greece since 1974. During
this period, she traveled every year to the Cycladic
Islands where she took many thousands of
photographs. After extreme editing these serve as notes
for large format paintings.
Through her own interiority she represents, by plastic
means, the architecture of the Cyclades, the light and
colors of the Greek archipelago. She sees each village,
house, street, sea or sky, as an enigma to be deciphered
and she believes that symbolism of architecture is one
of the means of unraveling the mystery of their creation.
The exhibition project brings together two parts,
resulting in the presentation of 25 to 30 large-format
paintings which will occupy most of the exhibition
space.
Jan 14- March 15, 2023
Artistic Approach
Large airbrush paintings on stretched canvas and
smaller studies done in soft pastel on Arches
rough watercolor paper (archival).
“These scenes evoke memories unhampered by
human associations, But the memories do not
just recall a remote geography and touristic
experiences. Rather Borstein’s modernism
directs us to the intrinsic qualities of the paint
and stirs our aesthetic responses to recollections
of timeless constructions of shapes, colors and
spaces.”
“Elena Borstein is at one with the buildings, especially the Greek ones in the Aegean Sea that she paints. Although she does not seek to penetrate the character secrets of
her Aegean houses, they nonetheless embody strong Greek traits. No one with any architectural sense would confuse them with houses of another country…what
makes these paintings so interesting is their concern with the aesthetics of Greek Structures. More than architectural celebrations as such, these buildings are
architectural investigations of light and form and the animated interaction of the two.”
The Artist: Elena Borstein
Elena uses photography as a starting point for painting. She goes out and takes dozens of photographs of the same thing from different angles — street corners, diners, reflections on plate glass windows — then she cuts, pastes and manipulates the pictures. Finally, at her easel, she tries to make her painting as faithful to the photos as she can. Often she’s putting two and three photographs together in order to create a complete image, and then basically compressing them into the compositional size and shape that she’s looking for in a finished painting. The result is a location you know you’ve walked on but that doesn’t really exist. She’ll raise the height of a building, and minimize an object. She’ll transpose the location of a street lamp or of a tree. … She composes it. “The airbrush, applied to canvas, the clarity, the light the precision and the meticulous labor of the work becomes magnetizing.
David Shirey writes in the New York Times, March 16, 1980