
In ‘Some of its Parts’, Elise Ansel continues her project of translating Old Master paintings into a contemporary visual language. The work in this exhibition explores the ongoing dialogue between painting, photography, and digital media. Playing off the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, Ansel employs the tools of photographic praxis — cropping, enlarging, burning, dodging, blurring, shifting focus — to deconstruct the haptic craft of painting. The medium of painting itself and its constituent parts — transparency, opacity, brush strokes, the flatness of the substrate — become her real subject matter. Adding a contemporary feminist twist to Clement Greenberg’s rigid orthodoxy, Ansel also and always alludes to the underlying presence of narrative structure, with a particular focus on POV (point of view).
Using energetic gestural abstraction, Elise Ansel translates Old Master paintings into a contemporary pictorial language. She mines art historical imagery for colour and form, setting aside the narrative and pictorial elements of these paintings and creating room for new interpretations. Her works interrupt linear readings of Old Master paintings, repurposing and highlighting the unexpected. The representational content is transformed into a celebration of colour, gesture, and the materiality of paint. In the process of reducing her inspirations to their most fundamental forms, she retains their power and energy, replacing imagery with dynamic movement and dramatic colour and light.


Cadogan is an independent contemporary art gallery with spaces in London, Hampshire and Milan. For over forty years our mission has been to represent, support and curate the work of a diverse roster of emerging and established artists. We care deeply about longevity, developing the careers of our artists and the journey of our collectors.

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