Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of fifteen paintings by Elise Ansel, on view 27 July through 31 August 2023 at 525 West 22nd Street. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Patricia Akhimie.

Elise Ansel creates by gently ransacking the artistic tradition. She transforms the insights she discovers in Old Master paintings, pictorial flashes she translates into the visual language of the world we live in. Her energetic gestural abstraction breathes life into art history. Thus the “Old Masters” become the point of departure for a woman’s reinterpretation of a tradition too long dominated by men: appropriation and reinvention. She shifts the focus from concrete subjects—mythology, religion, allegory, portraiture—to art itself.

Ansel begins with a series of small, improvisational studies, riffs on the works she finds in museums. These studies open the way to larger and larger works, each new state revealing fresh possibilities. The unexpected, the aleatory, electrify the process. “These ‘incidental accidents’ are emancipatory,” writes Patricia Akhimie in her catalogue essay. She explains, “The details to which we are accustomed in Renaissance paintings...become velvet swathes of color, stripped of baroque intricacies, and somehow made more glorious.”

“For a scholar of early modern culture like me,” Akhimie remarks, “this reverent irreverence is a delight because it scrapes away at the familiarly masculinist, exclusionary, and dogmatic strain that runs through so much of the artistic outpouring of the ‘Renaissance’ and reveals something volatile, appealingly rich and strange.”