Elizabeth Förster was born in Exeter, England in 1989. She studied art at Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2013 she moved to Bremen, Germany where she lives and works.

 

Elizabeth Förster´s paintings explore the space in which we encounter the incongruent. Taking natural processes as a starting point, she is interested in creating landscapes and spaces that are unworldly and yet familiar at the same time. Spaces that holds relics of or are reminiscent of nature; almost tangible and yet abstract and elusive. Oil, acrylic and pigments are combined in layers to present artificially organic environments. Through the use of texture and structure natural processes are conveyed: corrosion and decay, the fluid and the still, time passing and time suspended. Through the simultaneous presentation multiples, the paintings are imbued with a sense of incongruity: the stillness and the movement, the natural and the synthetic, order and chaos, time passing or time frozen and suspended. This space can be related to emotionally as well as formally as everyday life is filled with inconsistencies and things that do not fit neatly together.

 

Light and brightness play a big role within the work. The white layers often covering the canvas are intended as a concrete and metaphorical entry point into the works. The pale brightness is primordial and functions an entry point into the work as well as a trope, akin to "a long, long time ago" in a fairy tales, like a gateway into another world. The artist has long been fascinated with the idea ​​that Light - that what enables sight and perception can also make us blind. the indivisibility of lightness and darkness. This magical reimagining of the understated is reinforced through explorations of light within the painted structures on canvas. Interference paint is utilised within the layers to give a temporal aspect to the visceral surface: these paintings live and play within the light - blooming and abating with the light source. 

​

The source of the images in these paintings is based on the real world: textures such as bark, lichen, water and rust. The textures are painted from memory and imagination and as such depict impressions not instances. They are not intended as literal representations but rather a likeness that gives the viewer a familiar anchor into the paintings. With the abstract imagery there is little reference to size - the paintings are supposed to be boundless - just as likely to be a study of lichen on a rock, as of an expansive body of water. The compositions are created through the exploration of textures: the working and reworking of the impressions until they transform.

Dried flowers are included in the structure of some paintings. The materials themselves bring one back to the simultaneous presentation of a multiples, namely the organic and synthetic and the stillness of the dried flowers blooming again through the integration and exploration of light within the painted surface. This aspect of the paintings allows for new life: the colors glow and shimmer when illuminated by a light source. An active viewer is required - when the light source changes, so does the painting, playing and living in the light.

​