Elise Ansel

Elise Ansel was born and raised in New York City. She  lives in Portland, Maine. 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 earned her MFA in Visual Art from Southern Methodist University in 1993. 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. She is represented by Danese/Corey in New York City, Ellsworth Gallery in Santa Fe, and Cadogan Contemporary in London.

“My work fuses accident and design, intuition and intellect, abandon and constraint.

I translate Old Master Paintings into a contemporary pictorial language, with a specific focus on the rendering of subjectivity in the feminine. I use an idiom of energetic gestural abstraction to mine art historical imagery for color and narrative structure, abstracting and interrupting representational content, in order to excavate and transform meanings and messages embedded in the works from which my paintings spring. My work deconstructs pictorial language and authorial agency in order to address the myriad subtle ways that gender, identity and the belief systems of the artist are embedded in the meaning of the work. Old Master paintings were, for the most part, created by men for men. Abstraction allows me 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. My 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.”