Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of fifteen paintings by Elise Ansel, on view 27 July through 31 August 2023 at 525 West 22nd Street. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Patricia Akhimie.  

Elise Ansel creates by gently ransacking the artistic tradition. She transforms the insights she discovers in Old Master paintings, pictorial flashes she translates into the visual language of the world we live in. Her energetic gestural abstraction breathes life into art history. Thus the “Old Masters” become the point of departure for a woman’s reinterpretation of a tradition too long dominated by men: appropriation and reinvention. She shifts the focus from concrete subjects—mythology, religion, allegory, portraiture—to art itself.  

Ansel begins with a series of small, improvisational studies, riffs on the works she finds in museums. These studies open the way to larger and larger works, each new state revealing fresh possibilities. The unexpected, the aleatory, electrify the process. “These ‘incidental accidents’ are emancipatory,” writes Patricia Akhimie in her catalogue essay. She explains, “The details to which we are accustomed in Renaissance paintings...become velvet swathes of color, stripped of baroque intricacies, and somehow made more glorious.”  

“For a scholar of early modern culture like me,” Akhimie remarks, “this reverent irreverence is a delight because it scrapes away at the familiarly masculinist, exclusionary, and dogmatic strain that runs through so much of the artistic outpouring of the ‘Renaissance’ and reveals something volatile, appealingly rich and strange.”  

Elise Ansel (b. New York, NY) received her Master of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University in 1993 and her Bachelor of Arts from Brown University in 1984.  

She has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Cadogan Contemporary, London, United Kingdom; Danese/Corey, New York, NY; David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Providence, RI; David Klein Gallery, Detroit, MI; Carol Corey Fine Art, Kent, CT; The Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Auxier/Kline, New York, NY; and the Michael S. Currier Center at the Putney School, Putney, VT.  

Ansel has been included in institutional group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kraków, Kraków, Poland; Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Maine Center for Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME; the Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA; and Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA, among others.  

Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kraków, Kraków, Poland; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Eli Lilly Foundation, Indianapolis, IN; Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science, Evansville, IN; Ice Miller Donadio & Ryan, Indianapolis, IN; Sopwell House, St. Albans, United Kingdom; Art Masters Solutions, London, United Kingdom; and the Spring Island Trust, Spring Island, SC.  

Ansel lives and works between New York and Maine.  

Image: Virtue & Vice, 2023, Oil on linen, 60 x 48 inches, 152.4 x 121.9 cm