Elise Ansel

Elise Ansel translates Old Master paintings into a contemporary pictorial language. She mines art historical imagery for colour and narrative structure, using the Old Masters as a point of departure. The representational content is transformed into abstraction, obfuscating, if not entirely eclipsing it, through focusing instead on colour, gesture and the materiality of paint. Her paintings distil the familiar subjects of painting, repurposing and highlighting the unexpected. She interrupts linear, rational reading so the subject of her works becomes the substance and surface of oil paints, the range of its applications and the ways in which it can be used to celebrate life. The energy of the original images is replaced with a wave, an overt sense of dynamic movement and dramatic light that share an energetic equivalent with her inspirations. 

‘Elise has assimilated the originals at an unprecedented level, an almost atomic level, a level in no way attainable without absolute mastery of form and materials, before exploding them onto the canvas as her own’

Lara Santor 

Her work deconstructs authorial agency in order to excavate and liberate meanings buried beneath the surface of the works from which her paintings spring. Old Master paintings were, for the most part, created by men for men. Abstraction allows her to interrupt this one sided narrative and transform it into a sensually capacious, non-narrative form of visual communication, repurposing the patriarchal language and misogyny in the history of art. Her retelling of these paintings is infused with the joy of interrupting history, replacing the past with raw expression and embracing multiple viewpoints. 

Born in New York City in 1961, Ansel studied at Brown University before gaining her MFA in Visual Art at the Southern Methodist University. Her works have been exhibited in group shows and solo exhibitions across the United States and the UK, and are held in private collections worldwide. Her first exhibition with Cadogan Contemporary, ‘Drawn from History’, was held in 2013.