The right hand forgets the left

ellie works

JUly 11 - August 22, 2026

The Right Hand Forgets the Left presents new paintings by Ellie Works. Works' process is improvisational and accumulative, built from whatever is affordable and at hand: magazine images, oil paint, Dunkin' donut cups, colored lamp shades, reproductions of 16th century paintings, chair legs. These materials are not selected so much as wrestled with, incorporated in response to the qualities of the work as it develops and the moods that accompany making. Everything, as Works describes it, is on the kitchen table.

The paintings that result from this process are dense with contradiction. Icons, colors, desires, and found materials restlessly swap bodies, folding over themselves in ways that resist resolution. Works treats painting as a form that sustains contradiction without falling apart, and locates in that capacity something close to a life ethic. When things go right, meaning leaks through the surface like sweat from frenzied movement. When a painting collapses into an ugly, pitiful heap, that too is a valid destination. The exhibition takes seriously the idea that doubt and discomfort are not obstacles to painting but its raw material, and that the question of whether painting works at all is not a crisis but a reason to keep going.