Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: fraenkelgallery.com/artists/elisheva-biernoff
Elisheva Biernoff was born in 1980 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and lives and works in San Francisco. She received a BA with honors from Yale University in 2002, studied at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London in 2000–01, and received her MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2009. She is represented by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco and David Zwirner in New York and London. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, LACMA, the Hammer Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. She received a MacDowell Fellowship in 2016. Fraenkel Gallery has presented four solo exhibitions of her work since 2017, each accompanied by a monograph. In 2023, the Nevada Museum of Art presented her first major solo museum show. In January 2026, David Zwirner presented her first solo East Coast gallery show in New York.
Biernoff works in acrylic on thin sheets of sanded wood, painstakingly recreating found, anonymous photographs sourced from antique stores and online marketplaces — matching the intimate scale of the originals to the millimeter, painting both the front and back of each panel, and mounting each on a handmade wooden stand. Each painting takes two to three months to complete. The subjects are strangers: anonymous people in domestic scenes, figures in enigmatic settings, children, soldiers, families at moments of private significance. Severed from their original role as personal memories, these objects are painted with sustained attention that brings their latent emotional content to the surface. Biernoff describes her paintings as “reservoirs of time” — the goal, in her words, being to create a moment of perceptual doubt, slightly disorienting, like meeting a twin. Her more recent work has moved toward larger-format trompe l’oeil compositions, incorporating vintage paint-by-number sets and multiple photographic images arranged into complex still-life-like arrangements.
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