Martina Kaiser Gallery
Elise Ansel ‘Two Rivers’
Opening reception: Friday, 5 September at 7 p.m.
Introduction by Dr. Wenzel Jacob Founding director and long-term head of the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn
From New York to Cologne: Galerie Martina Kaiser is delighted to present American artist Elise Ansel as a newly discovered talent for the first time in Germany at DC Open 2025 with her first solo exhibition, ‘Two Rivers.’
Ansel conceives of her art as alchemy, transformation. She translates works by old masters like Bellini, Titian, and Vermeer into the contemporary visual idiom of gestural abstraction. Thus, her painting is simultaneously invention and interpretation. She counteracts the narrative and hegemonic content of images created predominantly by men, replacing the linear and the allegorical with the intuitive, spontaneous, and accidental. As she puts it, “It is in the slippage between intention and execution, the incidental accidents that occur during the painting process, the failure to translate correctly, the curvature of time, that new territory is gained and at the same time a deeper connection with the Old Master source of inspiration is forged.” By breaking up the figures and physical episodes on the canvas and dispatching them into polychrome fields, she makes color the connecting element between the original and the reinterpretation. “I shift the focus from narrative content to the brushstrokes themselves, and to the specific material characteristics of the media I work in.”
The exhibition title “Two Rivers” is a metaphorical leitmotif: intertwining and coexisting apparent opposites to create something new, unifying and sustainable. Elise Ansel deconstructs her sources: she explores, analyzes and dismantles Vermeer's “Woman Reading a Letter” or Bellini's “Madonna and Child,” also known as the Cornbury Park Altarpiece, again and again, until she has captured and revealed their universal validity and deeper truth. Her iterative interpretations, pointedly titled “Woman in Red” or “Woman Reading,” thus also shed light on current issues, conflicts and imbalances by opening up the possibility of co-operation and constructive exchange. Like the two rivers mentioned above, which come together to exist as one.
There is also a spiritual element in her work. Behind the pious depictions of Titian and Bellini, whose Madonna wears a red robe instead of the obligatory blue one, there are often secret metaphors, codes, and messages. These speak of spiritual and secular-existential themes undesirable, even forbidden, in the 15th and 16th centuries—and which still preoccupy us today. Elise Ansel reveals the spiritual content of the Old Masters through variations on the pictorial theme, making it visible by concentrating on pure color and thus transferring the unbroken validity of spiritual questions into the present.
The duality of religious impression and spiritual conspiracy, chastity and implied eroticism, the ecclesiastical and the secular in Bellini's and Titian's work also finds its counterpart in Elise Ansel's metaphor of the two meandering rivers. This is then continued in the contrast between Vermeer and Titian, outstanding representatives of Northern and Southern painting sensibilities. Vermeer’s restrained and secular paintings stand in contradistinction to the Italians' colorful, dramatic religious tableaux. It is a dialectic struggle between massed color and geometry. Elise Ansel depicts that tension in a highly compressed form.
Ansel aludes to Frank Auerbach and Gerhard Richter as points of departure. “Encountering Frank Auerbach’s interpretation of Titian’s Bacchus and Airiadne in conjunction with seeing Gerhard Richter’s series of five paintings titled Annunciation after Titian helped me realize that translations of Old Master works could be the subject of serious contemporary painting.” For Ansel, the Old Masters are blueprints for an emancipated, feminist imagery. Her paintings, in their inexhaustible variety, radiate a poetic endlessness. (Yorca Schmidt-Junker)
Elise Ansel lives and works between New York City and Maine. She studied art at both Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, while earning a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature at Brown University in1984. Working as a freelance artist since the early 1990s, she has had exhibitions in the US, the UK, and Italy; her works are represented in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland, the Farnsworth Art Museum in Maine, USA, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine, USA, NYU Langone, USA, and the Evansville Museum of Arts and Sciences in Indiana, USA, among others. Two Rivers is her debut in Germany.