Jeronimo Elespe (1975) - 3 works - Carpeta 34, The Print Subscribers Club

Folder no. 34 of The Print Subscribers Club, published in 2016 by Benveniste Contemporary, in Madrid. It contains three original etchings by Jerónimo Elespe (Madrid, 1975), signed in pencil and numbered 25/30, printed on 225 g Zerkall-Bütten paper cut by hand, measuring 38 × 32 cm (14.96 × 12.60 inches).

The first shows a room with a resolved window in a grid of gray tones with ochre stains. The second, in pinks and blacks, repeats the room in blood-ink, occupying the entire sheet. The third is a tiny plate in black, ochre, and blue, centered on a white sheet, with the print mark clearly defined.

The edition was printed at Dan Albert Benveniste’s studio, with whom Elespe has worked for years. The sheets are kept in their original blue fabric folder.

Condition: new. The sheets have not been matted or exhibited. The photographs have been color and light corrected from shots of the copy itself; the image of the room is a mounting simulation and the frame is not included in the lot.

Jerónimo Elespe was twenty-six years old when he finished his painting MFA at Yale in 2001, and two years later he was already exhibiting solo at the Von Lintel Gallery in New York. He was born in Madrid in 1975 and trained entirely in the United States: a BA from the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1996 to 1999, followed by Yale.

Elespe is one of the finest Spanish painters of his generation, and perhaps the one who has made the least noise to achieve it. He paints small canvases, sometimes as small as a hand, that invite getting close to within a few centimeters. The brushwork decomposes into minimal dots and marks, almost in the manner of pointillists, and from that weave come rooms with windows and figures that seem seen at dusk. His scenes start from autobiographical details and end in a territory that sits halfway between myth and domestic life: in Hesperides (2017), the maidens of the Greek garden appear with a headscarf and a glass in hand.

The résumé measures the level of recognition. He has exhibited at John Connelly Presents and Eleven Rivington in New York; at Soledad Lorenzo’s gallery in Madrid, in 2009 and 2012; at CAC Málaga in 2012, with text by curator Dan Byers; at Ivorypress in 2014, with a monograph, The Antipodal Room, that includes an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist; at LABOR in Mexico City in 2015, and at Maisterravalbuena in 2018. That same year MASS MoCA included him in The Lure of the Dark, a group show about night in contemporary painting. His work is held by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, CAC Málaga, and the Banco de España.

The print holds a distinct place in his work. He has been printing for years with Dan Benveniste in Madrid, and in 2024 his New York gallery, Van Doren Waxter, devoted a full exhibition to his graphic work, Woodcuts, Etchings and Monotypes. The three sheets of this folder, edited by the same workshop in 2016, translate the dotty texture of his painting onto the plate: a room with a window resolved in grays and ochres, the same room in pinks and blacks occupying the entire sheet, and a third minimal image, only a few centimeters in size, lost in the center of a white sheet. The latter is the boldest of the three.