Elliott Green

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Elliott Green (born 1960 in Detroit, Michigan) is an American artist who paints abstract, gestural landscapes that feel like surreal geographic terrains. He is based in upstate New York and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1993) and the Rome Prize (2011). His work has been featured in magazines such as Hyperallergic and Artforum.

Green studied literature and art history at the University of Michigan from 1978 to 1981, moved to New York in 1981, and had his first solo shows in 1989 and 1991. In 2005 he relocated to Athens, New York, where he continues to live and work. He mostly shows his work in New York but has exhibited in other states, including Florida and California.

In his early years, Green produced figural drawings, prints, and paintings that depicted crowds in a cartoon-like, humorous or subversive style. He has said his environment, especially his Tribeca studio, influenced these works. He began painting landscapes after being inspired by vast panoramas he encountered in Italy in 2012.

Critics describe his landscapes as essentially abstract, with forms of mountains, clouds, water, and land present but not fully legible. They often call his work otherworldly or sci-fi, noting a digital yet tactile feel created with sponges, palette knives, and smooth color gradients. His paintings are expressive and gestural, using a cohesive vocabulary of abstract shapes that reference geology and blend internal emotion with the external world.

Green’s work shows influences from Surrealism, traditional Chinese landscape painting, and Abstract Expressionism. His paintings are in several permanent collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and the University of Colorado Fine Arts Galleries, among others.