Elizabeth Warfel: Escapist Tendencies

Born in 1997, Elizabeth Warfel came of age amid successive smartphone upgrades, the rise of social media and the confinement of the pandemic. Her oil paintings take up the busy interiors of bars, pool halls, casinos and clubs: spaces of spectacle and communion in which one can be swept into the crowd and identity markers temporarily shed. Staged in the Berlin gallery’s Window space, Escapist Tendencies borrows the logic of the threshold, with arches and entryways framing glimpsed spaces beyond. Though no device appears, the camera phone’s presence is felt in blurred figures and warped walls. Warfel’s paintings exist where digital presence and physical space bleed together. Elizabeth Warfel (*1997, Lancaster, PA) lives and works in New York. She studied art history and studio art at Middlebury College in Vermont and the Sorbonne in Paris. She then studied painting at the Art Students League of New York. She was featured in the group show Time of Our Lives at Anthony Gallery in Tokyo (2024).