Zavier Ellis BRITISH, b. 1973

Overview
Zavier Ellis

Zavier Ellis combines the use of text with painterly, collage, assemblage and photographic techniques. Language is deployed to obfuscate and open new possibilities and meanings. Street signs, historical graffiti, literature and coded language are referenced by etching, collaging, painting and other means. Narrative is implied and the audience is invited into a confused dialogue with artist and artwork where the broken, derelict, incomplete and mistaken are noted but not embraced.

 

Combined with intense and layered application of traditional and industrial paints, drawings, collage, recycled studio detritus, and preparatory or found materials, Ellis creates a dynamic that oscillates between the cerebral and physical; conscious and unconscious; organised and chaotic; premeditated and instinctive. His hope is to give force to the reality of history and its price, rather like Ian Hamilton Finlay for Ellis the revolutions that mark the modern age are not so much to be celebrated as to be known and judged.

 

Zavier Ellis was born in Windsor in the United Kingdom in 1973. He read History of Modern Art atManchester University (1993-1996) before undertaking a Masters in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School (2003-2005). Ellis has exhibited widely including Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Saatchi Gallery, London; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles; KlaipėdaCulture Communication Centre, Klaipėda; Royal West Academy, Bristol; Dean Clough, Halifax; Paul Stolper, London; Galerie Heike Strelow, Frankfurt; Raid Projects, Los Angeles; Pera Museum, Istanbul and ENIA Gallery, Pireas. His work is featured in notable private collections including the seminal Sammlung Annette und Peter Nobel, Zurich and Beth Rudin DeWoody, Los Angeles.

 

Made in response to in depth historical research, his work combines text and expressive materiality with an emphasis on the reality of fragmentation. He is interested in histories and society’s conditioned responses to the multi-valent impact of tone and perspective. 

 

"In Ellis's reappraisal of the genre of history painting, the stage-like drama of one point perspective, and the triumphal pyramidal compositions of much early history painting has been replaced by the modernist grid, here embodied as a black and white chess board motif, parallel to the picture plane. Figurative elements, both painted and collaged, are imbricated within the abstract grid. We glimpse historically charged, partially obscured figures, as if through a grid darkly, such as senior Nazis, dressed in their signature uniforms; J F Kennedy; Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses; and protesters dismantling the Berlin Wall. National flags, that most concentrated index of nationalism and identity, feature prominently: The flag of Israel (Drapel Medinat Yisra’el); the German flag (Bundesflagge or Deutschlandflagge, a design reinstated from the pre-war Weimar Republic); and the French ‘Tricolore’ or ‘Le drapeau tricolore’ with its three colours representing the ideals of The French Revolution; blue for liberty; white for equality, and red for fraternity."

 

Richard Dyer, 'SITES OF CONFLICT', 2023

 
Works