Elena Unger grew up in Vancouver, Canada and moved to London in 2015 to study art. Unger is an alumnus of Fine Art at both Central Saint Martins and Goldsmiths, as well as a graduate of philosophy at the University of Cambridge. As both an artist and an academic, her art practice and academic work mutually inform one another. As an artist, she combines painting, sculpture, performance, sound, film, and installation to produce immersive, extra-liturgical installations. As an academic, she is concerned with the ontology of artistic making, arguing that works of art do not merely represent the ineffable but participate in it.
Unger was a CHASE Research Fellow at Goldsmiths in Philosophy and Art, where she curated an exhibition of film and performance. Unger is Artist in Residence at Saint Bartholomew the Great, London’s oldest Church, where she had a solo show in 2018, and curated an exhibition in 2023 entitled Eleven Twenty Three. Unger’s work was recently featured in the December issue of British Vogue. Unger was also featured in an art history book about Saint Bartholomew the Great by Charlotte Gauthier. Unger frequently exhibits in the UK and Canada and is featured in collections internationally.
Elena Unger is a documentary painter of the apocalyptic.
Working in oil with three-haired brushes, she constructs meticulously rendered compositions populated by thousands of grain-of-rice-sized figures. Apocalyptic and metaphysical undertones emerge through frameworks such as apophatic theology and phenomenology. Each painting becomes a hermeneutic exercise: creation as interpretation.
There is a controlled vastness in her work. The canvas confines a world that strains against its edges. Larger pieces depict totalities, while smaller ones distill fragments from those imagined cosmologies. This dialogue between micro and macro reflects the dual nature of the visions themselves—finite yet transcendent.
A historical undertow runs through the work. Influenced by Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, Unger’s paintings function as metaphysical documents of collapse. Fruit-laden excess, gutted relics, angelic flies, these are portraits of empire at the edge. She paints not what is, but what looms: a history of the not-yet. In bearing witness to ruin, her work urges the viewer to remain, to look, and to remember.
Growing up within the Persian diaspora, Unger was profoundly influenced by the tradition of miniature painting, its density, narrative intricacy, and mythological resonance. Her approach merges this visual lineage with broader mythic and speculative registers to construct timeless, emergent worlds.