Elena del Rivero
New York, NY
Elena del Rivero was born in Spain and has lived in New York since 1991. Her work has been shown across the U.S. and internationally. Notable exhibitions include The New Museum, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Drawing Center. She has been awarded the Prix de Rome (1988), the Pollock-Krasner fellowship (1991 & 2001), NYFA (2001 & 2002) and the Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Bellagio Center (2005). Elena’s practice consists of drawing and painting, but also includes photography, performance and video. She draws inspiration from experience, every day life and what is at hand. Sewing, mending, gilding and the written word are frequently used as alternative tools for drawing. Her work develops slowly, building visual narratives that are completed with carefully chosen titles favoring double entendres. She is interested in transforming decay and in reusing her damaged works that she puts back together as in a metaphor for mending life.
[Swi:t] Home
Elena del Rivero
Artist Bio[Swi:t] Home is an installation that combines papermaking, performance, fiber art and sound. Del Rivero began the project by creating paper “dishcloths” at Dieu Donné Papermill in New York. As part of [Swi:t] Home‘s exhibition at the Drawing Center in July 2001, del Rivero took discarded material from the dishcloths and created a thread linking the Center and Dieu Donné. After her lower Manhattan studio was heavily damaged by the fall of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, an extension of [Swi:t] Home was built by del Rivero from office documents that landed in her studio after the fall of the towers.