Painting with coloured lights directly onto photo-sensitive paper, Liz Nielsen achieves transcendence through abstraction, creating works that transport the viewer into a space beyond the image. While she harkens back to the photogram – an early photographic image made without a camera by placing an object directly on light-sensitive paper then exposing it to light – her image-making process and resulting work are completely contemporary. Nielsen calls the act of creating her work, which involves different objects, shapes, and coloured lights in a pitch-black darkroom, a 'performance'. ‘The final outcomes are pre-planned with strong intention and formally composed,’ she explains, ‘but because I’m working with light, they always have some surprises. The light bleeds and spills and doesn’t want to be contained.’

To create The Echoing Portal, the oversized photogram in the present lot, Nielsen overlapped coloured triangular shapes, alluding to a tunnel or passageway. Nielsen has exhibited worldwide, including New York, Mexico City and Berlin, and another unique work from this series is in the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection.