If, as the saying goes, patience is a virtue, the artist Elisheva Biernoff must be as virtuous as they come. Her painting technique requires a staggering amount of focus: Using old photographs of strangers she sources from eBay and antique stores, she painstakingly re-creates the images at a one-to-one scale—front and back—in tiny brushstrokes atop paper-thin plywood. She works on one painting at a time, and each takes three or four months to complete.
“They’re sort of…all-consuming,” the San Fransisco–based Biernoff, 45, says. She only makes about a handful of paintings per year. “I like living with one of them, having that bond.”
Biernoff developed her idiosyncratic approach out of a love of other people’s photographs, which she began exploring in college at Yale, where she was pre-med while also studying art. (“I thought that I could be a doctor that made art,” she says. An agonizing organic chemistry class proved otherwise, and art prevailed.)
In 2009, the year she got her MFA from the California College of the Arts, she was invited to design a window for the San Francisco Art Commission’s Art in Storefronts initiative. Biernoff asked people in the neighborhood to submit family photos, which she’d replicate using paint for her installation. The result was like a community living room wall, filled with all the intimacy of a photo album but elevated by the hyperattention her painting process demands. Making art this way brought her closer to people and places that were otherwise not known to her. She was hooked.
Since then she’s had solo shows in California (notably at the prestigious Fraenkel Gallery, which represents her), Nevada, and Canada. Now she can add New York to that list, with the recent opening of “Elsewhere,” her first solo show on the East Coast, at David Zwirner gallery’s elegant Upper East Side town house (a fitting setting for artworks based on family photos).
The show is like a mini retrospective, with 27 works spanning from 2011 to 2025. Alongside the paintings of old photographs is a newer work called Road Not Taken (2024), Biernoff’s recent exploration of the trompe l’oeil. Its nine component paintings look like paint-by-number kits—“living room art,” as Biernoff says—but in fact they have been worked over quite meticulously by hand. Even the wood grain of the frames is the artist’s doing.
The bulk of the photo-based paintings are tiny—some just four inches tall—but they speak volumes about memory, empathy, and what it means to look very closely. Biernoff doesn’t use a magnifying glass, making the details she’s able to replicate (like the two dozen holiday cards in Advent, 2025) even more impressive. “I feel like I squint a lot, and hunch a lot,” she tells me as we walk through the gallery. The brushes she uses are the smallest she can find.
The difference in time spent taking the original photographs and re-creating them is vast, and in that chasm lies their magic: “These images have a way of opening up the longer I spend with them,” Biernoff says. Little details emerge, like a grandparent’s hand in the bottom corner of Generation (2014–2015), or a bible verse written on the bulletin board in Beyond Our (2023). These latent discoveries can deepen, or even wholly change, the meaning of the painting.
For the most part, Biernoff works with photographs that were taken in the 1950s through the 1980s—eras when the camera came out for special occasions, unlike our current moment when taking a picture is as easy as whipping out your phone. The photos that were produced back then have a little more gravitas. Plus they have a specific palette, muted and blurred with the patina of time. Biernoff’s work feels more nostalgic than the slick photorealistic paintings of, say, Audrey Flack or Richard Estes.
Even if they are from a different generation, the photos Biernoff chooses capture ordinary moments that are no less familiar today: sitting on the couch, reading the newspaper, kids playing outside. But in using the photos of strangers, the wider context remains opaque. In Strike (2021), of a jagged tree stump in front of a white house, the only clue about what we’re looking at is an inscription on the back of the photo, which Biernoff has also reproduced: “Smashed up house after the storm. July 1970.” But what kind of storm, and where? “That’s interesting to me, how they stay ciphers,” she says. “I can make up stories about them, I can project my feelings onto them, but they are ultimately unknowable.”
As much as it is about time, Biernoff’s work is also about control—and the illusion of it. “Most of us, when we take photos, we want to look good, right? We want to control the outcome by dressing a certain way or posing or editing the photo. But I’m always drawn to pictures where something happens that the photographer or the subject did not intend,” she says.
When she’s scrolling eBay or hunting for photos at vintage shops, she’s looking for quirks: Maybe the photographer’s hand slipped, or the flash bounced off a mirror, or there was a chemical mishap during film development. Biernoff replicates those mistakes with the same precision and reverence as any other component of the picture. “They’re these avowals of humanity. It’s life in the moment rather than life idealized.”
Biernoff plays a role here too, sometimes inserting her own interventions. In the assemblage piece Fragment (2024), she re-creates a postcard from the 1950s that her grandmother-in-law collected, which is “tacked” (with a handmade ceramic pushpin) against “wood paneling” (hand-painted plywood). The postcard is of a 12th-century carved lintel fragment from the famous Cathedral of Saint Lazarus in Autun, France, depicting Eve as she reaches for the forbidden apple. The real carved piece was removed from the church and lost sometime in the 18th century, then rediscovered as foundation material for a house in town, cleaned up, and moved to Autun’s Musée Rolin, where it is still displayed.
“I loved how that related to the story of Eve and her displacement, totally banished for plucking the fruit,” Biernoff says. In that same vein of expulsion, Biernoff painted two rectangular patches in a lighter shade of wood grain to accompany the Eve postcard—like ghosts of postcards past.
The back of the Eve postcard isn’t visible, but Biernoff painted that too. It’s an imaginary note tracing the journey of the lintel carving, told from Eve’s perspective, and addressed to the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska. “By a wonder, I was salvaged, then sold, scrubbed, and spotlit. Do you call that resurrection or exile?”
Maybe it’s a rebirth—for this stone-carved Eve, and for all the anonymous people in Biernoff’s paintings. They all get an afterlife, whoever they are.
“Elisheva Biernoff: Elsewhere” is on view at David Zwirner, 34 East 69th Street in New York City, through February 28, 2026.