Elizabeth Chen (b. 2005) is a figurative artist working out of Baltimore, MD and Delaware. She is currently pursuing a degree in the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, with a minor in Drawing. She was the national recipient of the Winston 2D Visual Art Scholarship in 2025.

Statement

Devotion and worship exist for me as secular practices, and the continuation of veneration post-religion is central to my body of work. I appropriate the visual language of Catholicism as a shortcut through which viewers can immediately approach my work; poses, symbols, and hierarchies of the canon become a language I use to speak of a more personal doctrine. Within this shared vocabulary, I generate my own private iconography, expressing devotion to sensuality, queerness, and the body.

The process of translation is central to my practice. Details are allowed to merge and drift, supplemented by personal experience and identity. My figures transform into icons through the act of representation, just as martyrs turn to saints through repeated veneration. Depiction is the consecrating force. There is little separation in my mind between myself and the objects I create; my practice is all-consuming in a manner that feels more like worship than production. 

I have begun to think of my latest works less as drawings or images and more as objects or icons made for private devotion by and for the artist. I am currently expanding on this theme through woodworking and digital fabrication techniques, building frames and hybrid-sculptures which expand on the architecture of my drawings. I am pushing my body of work towards the ambiguous and concealed, draping my icons in shrouds which emphasize their private, sacred quality. 

The grounds I develop and scavenge are deliberately gritty and carelessly prepared, creating an uphill battle of generating subtly and beauty out of filth. The final product exists between the tension of the sacred and the dilapidated, with figures assuming the associations of both Madonna and whore. 

Instagram: @elizabethchen.art

Email: elizabethchen.art@gmail.com