Jeff Elrod

Jeff Elrod was born in 1966 in Dallas, Texas. He earned a BFA from the University of North Texas in Denton in 1991, studying under the painter Vernon Fisher, and in 1992 attended the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. In 1992 the Dallas Museum of Art recognized him with the Claire Hart De Goyer Award, and in 1998 he received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award.

Elrod's practice combines digital and analog methods. He draws lines directly on a computer, using software such as Photoshop or vector drawing programs to build compositions he has described as frictionless, then transfers and reworks them onto canvas by hand using techniques including digital printing, tape, airbrush, and acrylic paint. The resulting paintings read as abstraction but carry the visual vocabulary of screens, drafting software, and digital editing tools.

His exhibition history includes a presentation at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa in 1998, the solo show Focus: Jeff Elrod at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth around 2008 to 2009, and the solo exhibition Nobody Sees Like Us at MoMA PS1 in New York in 2013. He lives and works between Marfa, Texas, and New York.

Critics have consistently placed Elrod among the artists who most convincingly merged the look of digital drawing software with the physical, painterly tradition of American abstraction. Interview Magazine profiled him under the heading The New Abstract, framing his mouse-drawn line work as a distinct strand within contemporary painting rather than a novelty. His inclusion in group presentations tracing digital and post-internet abstraction, alongside solo exhibitions at institutions including the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and MoMA PS1, has reinforced a critical reading of his work as a serious extension of geometric and gestural abstraction using tools particular to his generation.

Elrod's highest publicly reported auction results are Figment IV (USD 233,000), Hey Moon (GBP 209,000), and Coyanosa (USD 162,500), all recorded through Phillips; the exact sale dates for these three lots are not confirmed in the accessible public record. The most precisely documented individual sale is Untitled, which sold for USD 50,000 at Christie's New York on 13 November 2014, in a Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale. Auction-data aggregators such as MutualArt report cumulative price points as high as roughly USD 343,594 for his paintings, but the underlying lot, house, and date behind that figure are not independently confirmed, so it should not be treated as a verified benchmark. Most of his recorded auction activity, including recent print and multiple sales, has cleared well below six figures, consistent with a market that remains comparatively thin relative to his museum standing.

Elrod's market is defined less by auction volume than by museum depth. No catalogue raisonne has been published, and the small number of public auction results, several of them for prints and multiples in the low thousands of dollars, means that headline "record" figures reported by some data aggregators should be treated with caution until tied to a verifiable lot. For a collector, the most reliable path to authentication and current market context is his primary galleries, Gagosian, Luhring Augustine, and Galerie Max Hetzler, all of which maintain detailed exhibition histories and collection records for the artist.