Edda Renouf seeks to reveal the abstract structures and intangible qualities dormant in her materials: “Materials speak to me and unexpected things happen. It is from a silent conversation between materials and imagination, from intuitive listening that the paintings and drawings are born.” Common subjects of Renouf’s works include the grain or weave of the paper or canvas with which she is working. She enhances these patterns by adding various layers of acrylic, oil pastel, and chalk, sometimes also adding incisions or sanding the surfaces of her pieces. The works’ titles are based on the time and place of their creation.
Renouf attended college at Sarah Lawrence College, leaving for a time to study at the Académie Julian. She earned an MFA from Columbia University. She also studied at the Art Students League and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich.
She has had more than six dozen solo shows at galleries in Paris, Basel, New York, Washington DC, Tolouse, Spain, Dusseldorf, Coral Gables, St. Louis, San Francisco, Chicago, Rome, Brussels, and elsewhere. She has had solo museum exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe in Germany, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Her work is in the permanent collections of dozens of major museums, including the Whitney, the Walker Art Center, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery, and the Brooklyn Museum.
