ELISE ANSEL

Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce Elise Ansel's second solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring new paintings that add new chapters to her engagement with the great Venetian masters of color: Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Lilly Wei. 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. As Wei observes, "Ansel is not a passive admirer, not a copyist in the manner of painters who stand before a painting to reproduce it, to acquire its techniques." She reconsiders the authority of mythological and Biblical narratives central to the Venetians' oeuvre, abstracting and reconfiguring them through a contemporary lens. Ansel herself notes, "I don't have a prescriptive method or approach. I engage in a dynamic, transformative dialogue or dance with historical art, allowing multiple iterations to emerge, in the process." 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.