Elizabeth Malaska: 2025 Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting

Elizabeth Malaska’s paintings unfold like scenes from a dream. A woman emerges from the body of a cow. Figures dissolve into walls or blur into fields of color. Domestic spaces—wood paneling, patterned floors, familiar furniture—become unstable, tilting toward the uncanny.

Her imagery draws on both the everyday and the mythic, collapsing the two into unsettling tableaux. At times, the body is rendered with exacting clarity; elsewhere, it slips from view, obscured or overtaken by paint. This instability gives her figures a charged presence—resistant, elusive, alive.

Her work resonates with Surrealism, the movement that used dream logic and the unconscious to unsettle reality, and with magic realism, where the extraordinary enters the ordinary world without explanation, creating images that feel at once impossible and matter-of-fact.

The bodies she depicts are often transformed, beings made whole through multiplicity—reclaiming what was once feared or forbidden, and revealing it as both tender and powerful. Malaska suggests that even in states of rupture, new forms of life and meaning can emerge.

About the 2025 Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting

The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, in partnership with the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation, is honored to present the winner of the 2025 Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting, Elizabeth Malaska. The prize, which began in 2011, is jointly administered by UMOCA and Suzanne Larson, who created the award to honor
her mother who was a painter.

Elizabeth Malaska (b. 1978, Portland, OR) earned her BFA from California College of the Arts and her MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, winner of the 2022 Betty Bowen Award, as well as a recipient of a Painter’s and Sculptor’s Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and a Hallie Ford Fellowship from The Ford Family Foundation. Malaska’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, the Schneider Museum of Art, and the Hallie Ford Museum. Her art has been featured in Ms. Magazine, Art in America, ArtForum, and ArtMaze, among others.

This noteworthy prize is awarded every other year to a distinguished painter whose work shows advancement in the field and practice of painting. No artist can apply for consideration, as selections come only via nominations by arts institutions, independent curators, artists, and gallerists from around the nation whose practice shows a deep investment in contemporary art and painting.

Final selection is made from a diverse panel of jurors. This year’s panel included Katherine Pill (Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, FL); Margaret Curtis (North Carolina and New Mexico-based painter represented by Tracey Morgan Gallery in Asheville, NC); Xi Zhang (painter and Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing, College of Fine Arts, Department of Art and Art History, University of Utah); and Suzanne Larson (artist and Executive Director of the Jarvis and Constance Doctorow Family Foundation, Utah).

Past winners of the Doctorow Prize include Kim Schoenstadt (2011); Tala Madani (2013); Firelei Báez (2015); Anna Betbeze (2017); Nancy Friedemann-Sánchez (2019); Genesis Jerez (2021); and Chie Fueki (2023).