Center of the Frame, which brings together paintings made between 1997 and 2024, is Judith Eisler's first monograph. Featuring an essay by Kirsty Bell, an introduction by Christopher Bollen, and an interview with Wade Guyton, the texts delve into the artist's fascination with cinema and the transmission of images through the various formats of analog film, television broadcasts, internet videos, and of course, the painted canvas.
"Eisler seizes on the information within the cropped still image in an entirely structural sense, beyond any cognitive meanings of expression, action, or emotion, focusing in on these differentiations as if examining the very infrastructure of vision."
—Kirsty Bell
Born 1962 in Newark (NJ), Judith Eisler lives and works in Vienna, Austria and Warren, Connecticut. The artist's paintings depict paused moments in cinematic time in which predominantly female subjects are caught midnarrative, cropped, and recontextualized by the fundamental elements of painting: form, color, and light. Using preexisting material borrowed from moving images, Eisler defines the abstractions inherent in the representational image with shifting marks of paint. The structure of the painting is informed by the information in the source as well as the more intangible issues of perception, desire, and mediation.
