Elisa Decker

Biography

Decker began life as a landscape painter, studying painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art back in the '70s. She concentrates on photography but also works in other mediums. For many years she documented her subjects with photographs so she could finish them off in her studio.

After the usual round of painting residencies (MacDowell, etc.), her road to Damascus moment came at a Camargo Foundation residency in 2005 when she was hiking around the cliffs of southern France. Pfizer featured her photographs in a solo show on her return to New York, and the rest is history.

From time to time Decker looks at art from the other side of the canvas and acts as a curator. Her first major curatorial effort was The Male Nude: Women Regard Men at the Hudson Center Galleries in New York City in 1986, and her most recent was Sympathetic Magic at the Westbeth Gallery in 2019. https://www.blurb.com/b/9622626-sympathetic-magic-exhibition-catalog

In addition to painting and photography, for many years Decker wrote reviews for Art in America, which led to her teaching a writing-intensive studio drawing course at BMCC-CUNY.

Instagram: @artwallah_decker

https://www.biascutmagazine.com/stories/embodying-impression-elisa-decker

Elisa was the model and her work is featured in this story in the May 2026 issue of Bias Cut Magazine.

Artist statement

I began to photograph weathered walls in Marseille several years ago when I was transitioning from painting to using the camera as a visual tool. At first, I was drawn in by the colors, textures, and abstract compositions that had informed my landscape painting, but I eventually realized that not just any wall would do. So what began as a purely formal study became an exploration of the seen and the unseen. 

The sidewalks of New York City are my playpen. Much of the raw material for my photographs, rubbings, and assemblages comes from there. Often I photograph what I see in situ, but sometimes pick up objects that call out to me. I look and play around with them long before they turn into anything. I get pleasure from just looking at them just as they are.

This ongoing series of photographs documents my investigation of quotidian reality and its potential for transcendence. Discovered mostly on sidewalks, street pavements, walls, dumpsters and construction sites, these easily overlooked motives resonate with me, suggesting portals to other worlds. 

A recurrent theme that has turned into several ongoing series involves returning to the same subject again and again over a period of time. The notion of flux inherent in the fixed comes into play, as it did in an earlier series of daily photographs taken over several years which documented the flow of time along Hudson River Park from the same vantage point each morning.