In Elisheva Biernoff’s Paintings, a Picture’s Worth Two Thousand Hours

If, as the saying goes, patience is a virtue, then artist Elisheva Biernoff must be as virtuous as they come. Her painting technique requires astonishing concentration: using old photos of strangers purchased from eBay and antique shops, she painstakingly recreates the images at one-to-one scale—front-on and Back – tiny brushstrokes on paper-thin plywood. She paints one painting at a time, with each painting taking three or four months to complete.

“They kind of… went all out,” said Biernoff, 45, of San Francisco. She produces only a few paintings each year. “I love living with one of them and having that connection.”

Birnoff developed her unique method out of a love for other people’s photos, which she began exploring while at Yale, where she studied pre-med while also studying art. (“I thought I could be a doctor who made art,” she said. A harrowing organic chemistry class proved otherwise, and art prevailed.)

In 2009, the year she received her MFA from CalArts, she was asked to design a window display for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Storefront Art program. Birnoff asked people in the neighborhood to submit family photos, which she would replicate with paint for use in her installation. The result is like a community living room wall, imbued with all the intimacy of a photo album but elevated by the intense attention required by her painting process. Making art in this way brings her closer to people and places she is unfamiliar with. She was mesmerized.

Since then, she has had solo exhibitions in California (especially the prestigious Fraenkel Gallery, which represents her), Nevada, and Canada. Now she can add New York to that list, having recently opened her first East Coast solo show, “Elsewhere,” at David Zwirner’s elegant Upper East Side townhouse (a fitting setting for creating art based on family photos).

This exhibition is like a mini-retrospective, with 27 works on display, spanning from 2011 to 2025. In addition to paintings of old photos, there is also a piece called ” road not taken (2024), Birnoff’s recent exploration of trompe l’oeil. Its nine works look like paint-by-number kits—“living room art,” as Biernoff calls them—but in fact they are all painstakingly crafted by hand. Even the wood grain of the frame is the work of the artist.