Elise Ansel. Luminous Flux

Cadogan Gallery is delighted to announce Elise Ansel's new exhibition "Luminous Flux", opening in Milan on October 24th; this will be the artist's first solo exhibition held in the spaces of the Milanese gallery.

"In Luminous Flux, Elise Ansel presents 14 radiant, glowing paintings evenly divided into two sets of sevens: the Woman in Blue series inspired by Johannes Vermeer's Woman Reading a Letter (c.1663) and the Woman in Red paintings which spring from Giovanni Bellini's Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints and Donor (1505). The paintings of each color vary in size and lined up feel like a devotion to chroma and paint. Ansel entwines a love for painting with a deep reverence for narrative and melds these forms together in a complex, innovative dialogue between her paintings and those by the Old Masters. She opens up possibilities, in little explosions of color and brushwork", writes New York-based author Dana Kinstler.

Using energetic gestural abstraction, Ansel translates Old Master paintings into a contemporary visual language. She mines art historical imagery for color and form, setting aside its narrative and pictorial elements to create room for new interpretations.
"In her radiant series, Ansel makes the secular Woman in Blue divine and transforms the sacred Woman in Red into something earthy and warm".

Born in New York City in 1961, Ansel studied at Brown University before gaining her MFA in Visual Art at the Southern Methodist University.