Elise Ansel | Observer

Five Things to Do in New York’s Art Scene July 24-28

Welcome to Things to Do, our weekly roundup of happenings in the ever-buzzing New York art scene. Here, we present an expertly curated list of the best goings on that don’t require an invite.

By Dan Duray

Thursday, July 27

Opening: Elise Ansel, Sea Change

Elise Ansel “creates by gently ransacking the artistic tradition,” with improvisational gestures that show a clear influence of Abstract Expressionism, though she cites her influences as stretching further into the past, to the Renaissance or Old Master paintings. “For a scholar of early modern culture like me,” Patricia Akhimie writes in the catalogue essay, “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.”