Elise Ansel

b. New York City, USA

In her work, Ansel translates Old Master paintings into a contemporary pictorial language. She mines art historical imagery for color and narrative structure. Her paintings use the Old Masters as points of departure. They move into abstraction by transforming the representational content, which is obfuscated, if not entirely obscured, by her focus on color, gesture and the materiality of the paint. Ansel’s work strikes a balance between conscientious precision and irrational improvisation.

She begins with a series of small spontaneous oil studies. Using renaissance methods and a grid, she transcribes these into large scale paintings. The large paintings embrace the choreography of the small works with an increased emphasis on color and gesture. Spontaneity, instinct and intuition eclipse rational, linear thinking during the process of making the small works. The large paintings, however, are more considered. Her work fuses accident and design, intuition and intellect, abandon and constraint. The real subject becomes the substance and surface of oil paint, the range of its applications, the ways it can be used to celebrate life.

Ansel deconstructs pictorial language and 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 that embraces multiple points of view.

Elise Ansel was born and raised in New York City. Ansel received a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1984. While at Brown, she studied art at both Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. She worked briefly in the film industry before deciding to make painting her first order medium. Ansel has exhibited her work throughout the United States and in Europe. Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Evansville Museum of Arts and Sciences.

Elise Ansel was nominated for the Young Masters Art Prize in 2013 and 2014.