Lisa Edelstein: The Den is slated to open September 16 at Anat Ebgi Gallery in Mid-Wilshire marking her first West Coast solo art exhibition. In the midst of pandemic lockdown, the actress started drawing. It initiated with wanting to make her own coloring book and she turned to old family photos as her point of departure. Starting with magic markers she swiftly shifted to watercolors. In studying these family photos, it conjured a time when pictures were spontaneous and captured something honest and authentic as opposed to the composed, conscientious and constructed photography of our current cultural moment.
Her drawing practice is contemplative and reflective, intimate, personal, obsessive and therapeutic. The artist reveals, “Today these are the pictures that we delete… So it’s a relief to look at images that capture the unedited, the uncomfortable and the unintended.”
Lisa started her career by writing, composing, and performing her AIDS awareness musical “Positive Me” at the renowned La Mama theater in New York City. She then pursued an acting career in television and film, volleying between comedy and drama. She played a variety of culturally ground-breaking roles such as Rhonda Roth in ABCs Relativity, which featured Lisa in the first lesbian make-out scene on network TV, and law student Laurie on The West Wing, who smoked pot and unashamedly chose prostitution to pay for her degree. Lisa then spent seven seasons as Cuddy on the worldwide hit Fox medical drama “House,” followed by five seasons as Abby, the star of “Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce,” and three seasons as Phoebe, Alan Arkin’s drug addict daughter on “The Kominsky Method.” During this time, she started directing - both on TV and her own projects (short films Unzipping, Lulu) as well as writing, selling both a pilot and a feature she is attached to direct. Next on the acting horizon is Fremantle’s limited series “Little Bird” as well as the short film projects “Swipe NYC” and “Shadow Brother” with Alden Ehrenreich. Entirely self-taught, Lisa developed an art practice during the pandemic. Her exhibition at SFA Advisory in New York marked her first-ever solo presentation.
