Incurable Disorder: The Art of Elizabeth McGrath

Self-taught, Elizabeth McGrath has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums in the US and Europe including the American Visionary Art Museum and the Bristol City Museum and Gallery. Her first book, "Everything That Creeps," was published in 2005. McGrath lives in Downtown Los Angeles with her husband, artist Morgan Slade; their daughter, Sadie Valentine Slade; and hairless chihuahuas Blue and King Tut.

Elizabeth McGrath creates sweetly-twisted creatures, rendering them in a wide range of materials. One of the leading women of the pop surrealism movement, McGrath has an uncanny knack for creating dark, edgy, fantastical works layered with beauty, angst and significance. Influenced by the relationship between the natural world and the detritus of consumer culture, she sculpts and paints endearing and often tragic beings, adorning them with cloth, paint, paper, gold leaf, rhinestones, shells and found objects. Often, these creations live in, or house, detailed dioramas. Incurable Disorder is Elizabeth McGrath's second full-length monograph, including works from 2005 to 2012. From dioramas to mixed media paintings to three-dimensional sculptures, each piece is infused with deep meaning: historical narratives, cultural references, and environmental statements, while teeming with the charm, dazzle and beauty of a lovingly crafted-and lovable-object. McGrath has always had an eye for the strange beauty in the grotesqueries of life; this appreciation is nowhere more evident than in her new works. She brings forth a new cavalcade of creatures from the darker corners of the streets, the city, and the imagination.