Susan Elias develops a body of work that combines intuition, precision, and visual poetry. 

Based in Berlin, she pursues in her studio a practice where color, gesture, and the memory of landscape form the foundation of a deeply personal pictorial language. Her work unfolds along two major paths: a rhythmic abstraction built like a silent choreography, and a series of landscapes inspired by the Roman stone pines, whose presence, symbolism, and light she explores.

In her abstract compositions, color moves with freedom, organizing itself into signs that punctuate the surface like breaths. Her gestures, at once spontaneous and controlled, evoke movements of dance—trajectories extending outward, tensions releasing, imaginary silhouettes taking shape and dissolving. As art critic Karen Yager notes, “Elias’s hieroglyphs and pared-down forms draw a language of great elegance, attuned to a refined and sophisticated sensibility… Her generous lines and the purity of her shimmering colors tell an abstract story, rich in complex emotions and formal codes, joyful, radiant, evocative, and quite simply beautiful.”

Her landscapes, centered on the Roman stone pines, reveal another dimension of her work: a contemplative relationship with nature. With a few acrylic strokes, she captures the presence of a tree, the vibration of an horizon, the movement of Mediterranean light. These paintings reflect a profound attention to the living world as well as a desire to reconnect artistic creation with the sensorial experience of landscape. They also carry the memory of her time in the south of France, at Château Noir, where the landscapes once painted by Cézanne and Picasso informed her palette and strengthened her attraction to luminous Southern colors.

Susan Elias’s background illuminates the depth of this exploration. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and has received several distinctions, including the Tiffany Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and residencies at the Cité des Arts in Paris, Yaddo, and the American Academy in Rome. These experiences have shaped an open practice grounded in dialogues between cultures, landscapes, and artistic disciplines.

Today, her work continues to evolve through a dynamic interplay of movement, color, and the memory of place, forming a distinctive pictorial language. Through both abstraction and landscape, her painting investigates how a gesture, a line, or a hue can become the sensitive trace of an inner world in constant expansion.

Julien Guiraud