Auxier Kline is pleased to announce the opening of Time and Materials, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Elise Ansel.  

Ansel’s new collection of paintings continue her use of energetic gestural abstraction to translate Old Master painting into a contemporary pictorial language.  Mining the canon of historical art for imagery, 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.  Ansel examines the impact of authorial agency and addresses the myriad subtle ways the gender, identity, and belief systems of the artist are reflected in the art.  Color and composition create the link between Ansel’s paintings and the historical artworks with which they are in dialogue. Gesture, movement and the body are the gateway to new narratives.

My work challenges monocular thinking. Old Master paintings were, for the most part, created by Western white 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. Abstraction metamorphoses the meaning of the works from which my paintings spring. If the Old Master paintings are pictorial, I try to make my paintings non-pictorial. I shift the focus from narrative content to the brushstrokes themselves, and to the specific material characteristics of the media I work in.

I’ve spent the last decade looking at art history through a female lens, countering or adding to a male perspective, overturning narratives of violence and voyeurism, rendering subjectivity/objectivity in the feminine. 

To be clear, my paintings are not critiques of the Old Masters but rather a use of their depth and resonance to shine a light on imbalances existent today. In this, the Old Masters are my powerful allies. Painting is an ongoing process of never arriving, a goal without an end. New ideas emerge from preceding paintings and new paths open up.  My work celebrates the exhilarating thrill of finding new sources in art, in nature and in oneself, of hybridizing past and present, exterior and interior, subject and object, time and materials. - Elise Ansel

Born in New York City in 1961, Ansel studied at Brown University before gaining her MFA in Visual Art at the Southern Methodist University.  Her works are held in private and public collections worldwide and are included 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.