Elsie Ansel
Colour is the protagonist; it both creates a profound link between my paintings and the art historical works from which they spring and weaves together disparate conceptual threads.
Elise Ansel is a British painter who translates Old Master paintings into a contemporary pictorial language. Throughout her work Ansel mines art historical imagery for colour and narrative structure. Ansel remains conscious that Old Master paintings were largely created by men for men. In response to the masculinity underlying Old Master works, Ansel utilises abstraction 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. Her works transform representational content, obfuscated if not entirely eclipsed by her focus on colour, gesture and the materiality of paint.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:
Permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Evansville Museum of Arts and Sciences.
EDUCATION:
MA in Visual Art from Southern Methodist University and a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University while also studying at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Ansel works and lives in Portland, Maine.
“I am interested in giving voice to the voiceless, in opening up historical art and finding alternative narratives. I’ve spent the last fifteen years looking at art history through a female lens, countering or adding to a male perspective, overturning narratives of violence and voyeurism, rendering subjectivity in the feminine. More recently I have begun to examine works created by female Old Masters, or “Old Mistresses” as they were famously called by Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker. I am energized by the opportunity to align myself with female artists from another time, another place; to draw strength and inspiration from their accomplishments, and to extend the conversation they began.”
Interview:
