Elise Ansel
On Her Work
The Evening Lecture Series is free and open to the public. With inquiries, please contact Curator Jacob Brooks.
Elise Ansel will be speaking about paintings in her exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery in Chelsea (April 2 – May 9, 2026).
Elise Ansel was born and raised in New York City. She earned a BA in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1984. While at Brown, she studied art at both Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. She worked briefly in the film industry before deciding to make painting her first order medium. Ansel has exhibited throughout the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland; the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, USA, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine; the Evansville Museum of Arts and Sciences in Indiana; and NYU Langone. She is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery in New York City, Cadogan Gallery in London and Milan, and Galerie Martina Kaiser in Cologne. Ansel lives and works between New York and Maine.
Using an idiom of energetic gestural abstraction, Ansel mines art historical imagery for 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. Her painting is simultaneously invention, re-vision and interpretation.
