Amy Ellingson
PROFILE
Amy Ellingson is an artist whose work explores the intersection of contemporary digital experience and the historical language of abstraction. Primarily identifying as a painter throughout her career, she has incorporated computer-generated imagery into traditional painting methodologies since around 1990, developing a distinctive practice that moves between the digital and the handmade, the virtual and the material.
Ellingson uses the computer to generate, repeat, vary, and reconfigure geometric forms, which are then translated into physical paintings through labor-intensive processes involving oil and encaustic. Her practice brings together seemingly opposing conditions: the speed of digital production and the slowness of handcraft, the artificial and the natural, and systematic protocols and embodied acts of making.
In recent years, Ellingson has increasingly used raster and vector files generated during her painting process as the basis for works in other media, including bronze and glazed porcelain sculptures, robotic drawings, hand-drawn graphite works, and Jacquard tapestries. Across these different manifestations, the same underlying informational “code” is translated through varying degrees of digital and material mediation, allowing her to explore the multiplicity of expressive possibilities contained within a limited formal system.
Composed of repeated lines, geometric forms, symmetry, and layered structures, Ellingson’s works create a shifting relationship between flatness and illusory depth, continually engaging the viewer’s perception. For Ellingson, abstraction is not simply a formal investigation; it is also a means of considering how digital technology is transforming both artistic production and the experience of looking itself.
At a moment when we find ourselves between an analog past and an increasingly digitally immersive future, Ellingson continues to investigate the possibilities of painting and abstraction through the relationships between technology and craft, image and object, system and perception.
BIOGRAPHY
1964 Born in San Francisco, U.S.
1986 B.A. (Studio Art) Scripps College, Claremont, CA
1992 M.F.A., California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA
2000 – 2011 Associate Professor of Art at the San Francisco Art Institute
2011 – Board of Director of Root Division, a nonprofit arts organization in San Francisco
2018 – Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico
AWARDS • FELLOWSHIPS (Selected)
2010 MacDowell Fellowship
2010 Ucross Foundation Residency
2009 Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship
2007 Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship
1999 Artadia Award to Visual Artists, San Francisco
PAST EXHIBITIONS
Solo Exhibitions (Selected)：
2023 Technosignatures, Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO
2021 LOOP, Eli Ridgway Gallery, Untitled Art Fair, Miami Beach, FL
The Mountains Are In Us, Eli Ridgway Gallery, Bozeman, MT
2020 Firmament, Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO
2018 Sweetbitter Beast, Robischon Gallery, Denver, CO
2016 Chopping Wood on the Astral Plane, Eli Ridgway | Contemporary Art, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, CA
2014 Field Theories, ProjeKcts by Projects/Shoichiro, Tokyo, Japan
2014 Iterations & Assertions, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA
2013 Recent Work, Miami Project, Eli Ridgway Gallery, Miami, FL
2010 SUMMER FRIEZE, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2008 Recursions, Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY
2006 Recent Work, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2004 Semper Augustus, Charles Cowles Gallery, New York, NY
2003 Ec/centric Compositions, Haines Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2002 Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, Fassbender/Stevens Gallery, Chicago, IL
Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall, Frumkin/Duval Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
1999 Between Repetition and Insistence, jennjoygallery, San Francisco, CA
1997 A Hankering…, Gallery 16, San Francisco, CA
1994 Flora and Fauna, FOOD HOUSE, Santa Monica, CA
1992 The Princess and P., thesis exhibition, CalArts, Valencia, CA
Group Exhibitions (Selcted)：
2026 Women in Abstraction, Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2024 Berggruen Gallery booth, Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami Beach, FL
2020 Topographies, Alcoves 20/20, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM
2017 Open Ended: Painting and Sculpture Since 1900, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
2017 Detritus, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San, Jose, CA
2014 Women and Print, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, CA (catalogue)
2011 One Thing Leads to Another: Seriality in Works on Paper, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, CA
2010 Ucross: Twenty-Seven Years of Visual Arts Residencies, The Nicolaysen Art Museum, Casper, WY (catalogue)
2003 Matter & Matrix, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont, CA (catalogue)
2002 Bay Area Now 3, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (catalogue)
1996 New American Talent: The Twelfth Exhibition (Lisa Phillips, Juror), Austin Museum of Art at Laguna Gloria; Austin, TX (catalogue)
Public Art and Commissions (Selected):
2025 A Day in the Sun, San Diego International Airport, Terminal 1
2015 Untitled (Large Variation), San Francisco International Airport, Terminal 3
COLLECTIONS (Selected)
The Paul Allen Collection, Seattle, WA
Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA
Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA
Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA
PUBLISHED WRITINGS (Selected)
2026 On Painting and the Nature of Work, N+Co.
2023 Contributed to Hyperallergic, writing about exhibitions in the Santa Fe region
OFFICIAL LINK