Lizzie Zelter

Edgeless: In the Expanded Field of Painting

San Diego State University Art Gallery, San Diego, CA

September 24, 2026 - December 3, 2026

Curated by Jacqueline Marino

Anna Betbeze, Monique van Genderen, Lizzie Zelter, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung

Edgeless: In the Expanded Field of Painting brings together four painters, each of whom incorporate both traditional and unconventional media as material and surface. Marked by hybridity and permeable boundaries, the “expanded field” of painting refers to an approach of rethinking what a painting can do beyond the medium’s physicality and enduring history.

While nontraditional approaches to art have existed across cultures and throughout history, the concept of an expanded field was first articulated by critic and art historian, Rosalind Krauss, in her 1979 essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” Though Krauss addressed the changing definition of sculpture, her analysis challenged postwar conventions of medium specificity and the limitations they placed on how artists could engage with material and form. These ideas resonated with developments in painting, as artists who had been incorporating physical action, performance and material experimentation into their work moved further beyond the frame and stretcher.

Edgeless highlights this trajectory. Using conceptual, intuitive and elemental processes, artists cut, print, stitch, burn, dye and fire their materials to create the suggestion of a painting, or incorporate strategies of sculpture alongside the act of painting. Additionally, fragments of poetry, feminist theory, literature and film, as well as actions of play and touch, provide unending source material for each artist to translate, layer and deconstruct through their singular modes of abstraction.

Throughout the exhibition, Edgeless considers contemporary practices that exemplify the potential of the medium while remaining firmly grounded in and continually returning to the act of painting.

As a collector of images, Lizzie Zelter makes paintings that carry edited fragments and glints of information from urban life. She selects reference imagery for its tactile nature: zoomed-in photographs taken on neighborhood walks, scraps of fabric, printed matter from books or printouts from fashion resale sites. In her studio, Zelter layers drawings on transparency paper upon one another, creating a collage of source material and her own marks that become present but decontextualized in her paintings. This same sensibility and attention to materiality lends itself to Zelter’s practice as a whole, whether working with painting or sculptural objects.

Her work in Edgeless departs from the hand-picked photos of customized light switch plates found on websites like eBay and Etsy used for her series Intercom. Separated into pairs, they are printed on velvet, mounted onto small mirrored boxes and then strategically sequenced and titled. As a group, the photos, which are at once nostalgic and niche, create a larger game of association. Zelter is also intrigued by how displays of adornment can transform utility and how mundane domestic objects can become opportunities to construct value and individuality.

This tension between banal and excess sets forth the internal logic and associative properties present in the selection in the exhibition. Upon extended observation, details from the light switch plates emerge as pieces of abstracted imagery included in the larger painting on the other side of the wall. The smaller, narrow paintings respond to the architecture within the gallery by echoing the dimension and shape found within freestanding walls. Zelter’s works join both the high and low, object and ornamentation, questioning taste and value as it relates to art, and the porous boundaries between the public and social spheres.