NEW YORK, NY.- Y Gallery presents Near to Far, an exhibition of new works by American painter Elliott Lloyd. This is the first part of a larger project commemorating the artist’s artistic career spanning over forty years. In March 2014, Y Gallery will present the second half of this program with a selection of Lloyd’s historical paintings from the sixties and seventies, which will include those exhibited in the 1967 Whitney Museum’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting.

Near to Far associates directly with the natural, both physically and within the confines of the eye’s perceptions, as grounded in the most personal of phenomena: sight, and its corresponding experience of geography through distant layers. The titles of these works reference inlets, ports, and species of birds as points of migration and movement. The implied mobility subjugates Lloyd’s current process of painting, assuming the simulation of osmosis or an absorption that utilizes gravity and chance to create the paint spots, which combine to compose each painting. In his most recent series Lloyd develops two distinct layers that constitute the painting; his aim is to emphasize the experiential qualities of painting as a medium.

It is a contemporary reality that at least half of our visual experience enfolds before a screen, whether it be a window, TV, computer or so on. In paintings as they are historically considered, there is no screen. There is only the surface of the painting with the brushstrokes laid down, bare to view. Similarly to Rothko, Kline, or Stella’s attempts to unveil a painting’s previous or rejected layers, or rejected layers boldly, these new works by Elliott Lloyd investigate the series of strokes laid down, in reverse. Elliott Lloyd describes his arrival at this current approach to painting, “Working in transparencies and drawing within the painting progressed over the years to include this new process of working in reverse. The method of working on a clear surface utilizes what the eye naturally does as it processes the series of events of a painting, the painting process is revealed… Every thought has a trace in the work. Nothing really covers anything else up.”

Elliott Lloyd was born in Sioux City, Iowa in 1937 and moved to New York in 1961. He attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. Lloyd has had solo exhibitions at the Soho Center for Visual Artists, Hal Bromm Gallery, and Abraham Sachs Gallery. His work is in the Whitney, Aldrich, and Newark Museums, as well as in many universities, galleries, and private collections. He has been reviewed by The New York Times, Art Forum, Art International, Art in New York, and Art News. Lloyd has also been an instructor at the Parsons School of Design, where he taught drawing for twelve years. Lloyd currently lives and works in Long Island City, Queens, New York.