NEW YORK, NY.- Miles McEnery Gallery announces Elise Ansel’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring new paintings that add new chapters to her engagement with the great Venetian masters of color: Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Lilly Wei.
In these new paintings, Ansel continues her dialogue with art history, viewing the Venetian painters not as revered authorities but as catalysts for her own alchemical practice. By closely analyzing their paintings’ color, composition, and facture—she internalizes their chromatic and structural logic before exploding them onto the canvas as her own. Creation goes hand in hand with destruction.
As Wei observes, “Ansel is not a passive admirer, not a copyist in the manner of painters who stand before a painting to reproduce it, to acquire its techniques.” She reconsiders the authority of mythological and Biblical narratives central to the Venetians’ oeuvre, abstracting and reconfiguring them through a contemporary lens. Ansel herself notes, “I don’t have a prescriptive method or approach. I engage in a dynamic, transformative dialogue or dance with historical art, allowing multiple iterations to emerge, in the process.”
Throughout the exhibition, abstraction disrupts narrative; the painted substrate is a site of both excavation and invention. By transforming Titian’s compositions into vibrant, non-figurative fields, Ansel changes their meanings, proposing a capacious visual space where historical precedent and contemporary practice converge to generate artistic freedom.
Elise Ansel (b. New York, NY) received her Master of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University, TX, in 1993 and her Bachelor of Arts from Brown University, RI, in 1984.
She has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Auxier Kline, New York, NY; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME; Cadogan Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Cadogan Gallery, Milan, Italy; Carol Corey Fine Art, Kent, CT; Danese/Corey, New York, NY; David Klein Gallery, Detroit, MI; David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI; Galerie Martina Kaiser, Cologne, Germany; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; and The Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA.
Ansel has been included in institutional group exhibitions at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME; Lehman College Art Gallery, Lehman College, The City University of New York, Bronx, NY; Maine Center for Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME; Museum of Contemporary Art Kraków, Kraków, Poland; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom; and Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA, among others.
Her work may be found in the collections of Art Masters Solutions, London, United Kingdom; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME; Eli Lilly and Company, Indianapolis, IN; Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science, Evansville, IN; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME; Ice Miller Donadio & Ryan, Indianapolis, IN; the Museum of Contemporary Art Kraków, Kraków, Poland; NYU Langone Health, New York, NY; Sopwell House, St. Albans, United Kingdom; and the Spring Island Trust, Okatie, SC.
Ansel lives and works between New York and Maine.
