Elena Unger

Elena Unger (b. 1997) grew up in Vancouver, Canada and moved to London in 2015. Unger is an alumna of Fine Art at both Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths, as well as a recent graduate of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge. As both an artist and an academic, her art practice and academic work mutually inform one another. As an artist, she combines painting, sculpture, performance, sound, film, and installation to produce immersive, extra-liturgical installations. As an academic, she is concerned with the ontology of artistic making, arguing that works of art do not merely represent the divine but participate in it.      

Unger is Artist in Residence at Saint Bartholomew the Great, London’s oldest Church, where she had a joint exhibition, Fragment, in 2018 and recently curated a large group show, Eleven Twenty Three, in honour of the Church’s 900th anniversary. Eleven Twenty Three was one of FAD magazine’s top exhibitions of May. Unger has been awarded the Freedom of the City of London by the Painter- Stainers. Unger was recently a CHASE Research Fellow at Goldsmiths in Philosophy and Art, where she curated an exhibition of film and performance. Unger’s work was featured in the December 2022 issue of British Vogue in the Vogue Gallery feature. Unger was also featured in an art history book about Saint Bartholomew the Great by Charlotte Gauthier. Unger frequently exhibits in the UK as well as in Canada. Her work is featured in public and private collections internationally.

Painting is at the heart of Unger’s practice. The images in her paintings come to her fully formed, like waking dreams, and demand to be translated into intricate, meticulously rendered compositions. Working in oil with three-haired brushes, she constructs dense, highly detailed worlds populated by thousands of grain-of-rice-sized figures and hidden details. The apocalyptic and metaphysical undertones of these visions are refracted through philosophical frameworks, including apophatic theology and phenomenology. Each painting becomes an exercise in interpretation—a hermeneutic process where the act of creation is also an act of understanding.

Ultimately, Unger’s work is an invitation—a call to enter these meticulously crafted spaces, to lose oneself in their details, and to grapple with the vastness they evoke. Her paintings propose encounters with the infinite that resonate on both intellectual and spiritual levels, asking viewers to engage with the unknowable as it reveals itself, fleetingly, through the material confines of the painted image.