Ellen Altfest

Ellen Altfest is a realist painter who encourages an extended viewing of natural subjects, be it a forest or her subject’s armpit hair. She always paints from life, and her finished canvases are often the result of sketching the same subject for months at a time. Her artworks are meditative, even hallucinogenic—projections of her subjects that have been burned into her brain, rendered like they might be in a dream. Altfest is interested in perception; she allows the space around and within the object to speak to her and synthesize over a period of time. Like a word repeated to the point of irreconcilability, her paintings appear unruly in moments—generalized washes or brushstrokes are more functional than emotional, and the details only appear where she sees them fit. Altfest renders these indifferent objects in a way that might imbue them with meaning, questioning the glorification of painted subjects and the ways in which one might assign importance to details they view.

Altfest has had solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York and the Chianti Foundation, Marfa, Texas. She has exhibited at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and Artists Space, New York. She has been awarded fellowships by the New Museum (2014), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2012), The Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts (1999–2000). She was Artist-in-Residence at the Chianti Foundation in Marfa, Texas, in 2010.