Pickles

Diana Ellinger

Acrylic on canvas

40cm x 47.5cm

2025

I’ve known of Diana's family for years—I went to school with her big sister, and later discovered her incredible work through a dear friend. It’s been such a joy following her practice since, and I was thrilled when she said yes to being part of this group show.

Diana is a National Emerging Art Prize alumni, and her abstract work is just stunning—thoughtful, expressive, and deeply considered. Alongside her fine art practice, she brings years of experience in design, which you can really feel in the clarity and sensitivity of her work.

I’ve always admired the quiet confidence in what she makes. It feels so special to have her included—another brilliant woman artist bringing her unique voice to the conversation.

Artist Statment

Diana Ellinger’s painting practice explores abstraction. Her process-driven work is a patchwork of methodologies and modes of thinking that weave together pockets of repurposed abstract expressionism with her own constructed painterly systems. Anti-compositional strategies – use of ready-made marks, colour and erasure combined with the subconscious working of gestural art – make Ellinger’s paintings complex. Ellinger wants to re-do gestural art, but on her own terms finding ways to use the material honestly and playfully. Her paintings work themselves out. Their process makes them. Deep layering affords the viewer a kind of archaeological dig through an entanglement of forms obliterated and then revealed. Buried brushwork scars the surface, reappearing layers later. This is where the ready-made elements – poured paint, found marks, geometric shapes – come into compositional play. Colour is important. Ellinger works with a collection of mixed colours that she names – bored grey, garage pink, nico green, and so on – each one like an old friend to call upon when needed, each with its own weight, personality and function. Slippages in their exact make-up sneak into the work, a type of automatism dictated by memory, quietly but surely influencing process. Ellinger uses proximity of colours and the push and pull of light and dark to build uncanny spaces where forms weave, pulse and hum. Chance and movement through the application of paint and its removal, through crude shapes and the bumpiness of layered paint creates a sense of unpredictability and discovery. There is a kind of coyness of approach, one that reaches the destination indirectly via a network of unused backstreets. Ellinger’s art celebrates the discarded, over-looked or forgotten things. And in those things it finds beauty and puts them to use. Her working cycle is a closed-loop that flicks up dirt and settles it back down into a friable substance, extending a life, making-do, squeezing out the last drop, stitching it all together.

Artist bio

Diana Ellinger lives in Nairobi. She is an illustrator, graphic designer and fine artist. Ellinger has shown multiple times at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space in Manuka and the School of Art and Design Gallery at ANU. Her recent show in Nairobi with Valerie Brennan, Odyssey, was a vibrant exploration of abstraction and material. In 2023 she was part of the group show GROUNDED at Gallery Jones, Ripponlea. She was a finalist in the National Emerging Art Prize (NEAP) and the Corner Store Gallery Mini Series Art Prize in 2023. She was a finalist in the Omnia Art Prize 2024. Her work has been featured on the popular Australian design blog The Design Files and in Art Edit magazine.

To purchase this work please contact Harriet Links through her website.