Lizzie Zelter

Lizzie Zelter creates paintings and mixed media installations that confound spatial continuity by distorting the architecture of everyday sites: homes, stores, and transportation hubs. She explores the micro and macro infrastructure of urban life and the physical structures that produce our built environment. By utilizing reflection and fragmentation devices in her compositions, she morphs scale and perspective to decontextualize and disguise the familiar. She seeks to disrupt visual identification, slowing down the act of recognition and compelling viewers to negotiate perspective Currently, Zelter is working on a series of oil paintings that depict commercial window displays, ceilings, balconies, and sidewalks. These paintings contain domestic objects superimposed onto street views and bizarre architectural vantage points. She uses both thick and thinned-down oil paint to create a range of materiality and transparency, allowing different types of image-making techniques to come together in one picture plane. Her smaller assemblages made from studio scraps further question the boundaries of depicted space by physically layering and dividing a 3D environment. Considered together, this body of work investigates what mundane, urban threshold sites can elucidate about our society’s approach to place-making, material culture, and reinvention. Zelter is based between New York, NY and San Diego, CA where she directs and curates exhibits for Two Rooms, an artist-run gallery and experimental project space. Zelter received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2022 and a BA in Global Cultural Studies in the Program in Literature at Duke University in 2018. Her work has been exhibited at Spring/Break Art Show and Winston Wächter Fine Art in New York, NY, at the Athenaeum Art Center in San Diego, CA, and internationally at Gallery II in Tel Aviv, Israel and Estación Tijuana Libertad, Tijuana BC, Mexico.