Some of its Parts

This catalogue accompanied Ansel’s seventh solo exhibition at Cadogan in 2023, in which she continued her project of translating Old Master paintings into a contemporary visual language. The catalogue also features an insightful essay written by Claire Messud. 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).