Elise Ansel
UPCOMING EVENT | TUESDAY 7 APRIL, 6:30 PM — 7:30 PM | 8 WEST 8TH STREET, NEW YORK 10011
Hosted by the New York Studio School, Elise Ansel will be speaking about paintings in her exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery in Chelsea. This event is free and open to the public, with no registration required for in-person attendance.
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION:
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.
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.
The exhibition is on view through 9 May 2026 at 511 West 22nd Street, accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Lilly Wei.
Elise Ansel in her studio, East Hampton, NY, 2025.
Photographed by Dan Bradica.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Elise Ansel was born and raised in New York City. She earned 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 throughout the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.
Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland; the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, USA, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine; the Evansville Museum of Arts and Sciences in Indiana; and NYU Langone. She is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery in New York City, Cadogan Gallery in London and Milan, and Galerie Martina Kaiser in Cologne. Ansel lives and works between New York and Maine.
Using an idiom of energetic gestural abstraction, Ansel mines art historical imagery for color and narrative structure. She uses abstraction to interrupt representational content in order to excavate and transform meanings and messages embedded in the works from which her paintings spring. Her painting is simultaneously invention, re-vision and interpretation.
