Spotlight: Ellen Altfest

FEBRUARY 27-APRIL 5, 2025

The Spotlight series includes a new or never-before-exhibited artwork paired with a commissioned piece of writing, creating focused and thoughtful conversations between the visual arts and authors, critics, poets, scholars, and beyond. In this iteration, the Spotlight features Ellen Altfest’s Borrowed View, 2022-23. A text by curator Julien Domercq accompanies the presentation.

Shakkei
By Julien Domercq

More than fifty times between May and July 1888, Vincent van Gogh climbed up the rocky outcrop of Montmajour, overlooking the plain of La Crau, three miles to the north of Arles, in southern France. There, in the wild garden surrounding the ruins of a 12th century abbey, he produced a series of six drawings; reed pen-marks boldly overlapping, offering close-ups of wild grasses, curving pines, and rocks, contrasting with sudden openings onto the plain below, its fields stretching into the horizon.

Ellen Altfest’s Borrowed View (2022-23) was painted over many seasons on a plot of land belonging to her in-laws in Rising Fawn, Georgia. It was made following a three-month residency in Kyoto, Japan, during which time she painted a single patch of sugigoke moss in the garden of Enrian temple, working from 6:30 in the morning until dusk. On her return home, she set about to make a painting that she wished would be pleasurable to the Japanese sense of aesthetics and encapsulate life at its peak: lush, green, life affirming.

Van Gogh was very much taken by Japanese art—particularly the ukiyo-e colour woodblock prints that he collected with his brother Theo—from which he gained the use of the crop and the opposition between close-ups and receding perspectives. He would have understood and shared Altfest’s attraction to the principle of Shakkei, ‘borrow scenery,’ an ancient garden design technique whereby a distant view, such as a mountain, is incorporated or ‘borrowed’ into the composition of a garden, becoming a continuous part of the garden itself.

The analogy between Vincent and Ellen—at first glance, the unruly and tormented Dutchman toiling in Arles and the thoughtful and contemplative American painstakingly observing nature in Connecticut and Georgia—might seem odd at first, but it would be misunderstanding the fundamental nature of their practice. Van Gogh’s work too is imbued with a profound sensibility for the motif in front of him, the result of meticulous observation; while Altfest’s, under the veneer of realism, and a quiet and meditative approach, offers a depth and power that transcends the simple depiction of what lies before her. Both too are endlessly fascinated by nature – not at its most grandiose, sublime or picturesque, but in its simplest, most fundamental incarnation—and by gardens. And while their compositions might at first appear incidental, they are anything but.

“I see so many parallels between making a garden and creating a painting,” Altfest recently wrote for the 10th issue of the Journal of the North American Association of Japanese Gardens, reflecting on her time spent in the grounds of Enrian. “I like the idea, put forward in the Sakuteiki [the oldest published, 11th century Japanese text on garden-making], which reads like a painting manual to me: you only take the most interesting parts of nature as your inspiration in the garden. That’s what a landscape painting is too, the most compelling and highly edited parts of what you see in a specific place.”

After a week sifting through the visual chaos of the woods, as she puts it, searching for the ‘right’ view, one that she could make truly hers, Altfest settled on what was to become Borrowed View: a distant landscape closely cropped by a tree and its branches, itself tightly framed by the edges of its small canvas, almost, but not quite, square. Like Van Gogh on the Montmajour hill, she contrasted the meticulous observation of nature at close quarters with a sweeping but tightly framed distant view of fields. The rugged bark of a tree, speckled with moss, and weird hairy lichen, occupies most of the foreground, its tortuous branches reaching across the rest of the composition. Painted in short dabs of cooler greens, where blue accents dominate, a view of a domesticated valley appears through a light haze. One can decipher fields, punctuated by lines of trees, planted at regular intervals. Man-made nature is contrasted with the wild, unkempt, organic aspect of the tree.

Looking at Altfest’s view, I cannot help but recall Van Gogh’s emotion at the sight of the fields from Montmajour, describing what lay before him as being ‘as beautiful and infinite as the sea,’ yet remarking that it is ‘better than the sea because it’s just as infinite and yet you feel it’s inhabited.’ Altfest’s painting seems to encapsulate a whole world, microscopic and macroscopic: the subatomic smallest present in the interstices of the bark, in the leaves of the moss which are one cell thick, and the fragment of a populated landscape stretching into the horizon, offering the potential for an infinity of human experience.

Both artists possess a rare ability to hone in on the simplest of things. For most, bark, moss, a pinecone or a blade of grass might not seem like much, but for Van Gogh and Altfest, they hold an entire world. “If we study Japanese art,” Van Gogh wrote to Theo in September 1888, “then we see a man, undoubtedly wise and a philosopher and intelligent, who spends his time—on what?—studying the distance from the earth to the moon?—no; studying Bismarck’s politics?—no, he studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw all the plants—then the seasons, the broad features of landscapes...He spends his life like that, and life is too short to do everything.”

About:

Ellen Altfest (b. 1970, New York, NY) is an artist living and working in New York, NY, and Rising Fawn, GA. Altfest received a degree English and Painting at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in 1993, and later received an MFA in Painting from Yale University, New Haven, CT, in 1997. In 2002, Altfest studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME. Recent solo exhibitions include Nature, White Cube (Online) (2021); Green Spot, White Cube, Hong Kong, China (2019); Ellen Altfest, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom (2015); Head and Plant, New Museum, New York, NY (2012); and The Bent Leg, White Cube, London, United Kingdom (2011). Recent group exhibitions include Close, GRIMM Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2023); Listen to the sound of the Earth Turning: Our Wellbeing Since the Pandemic, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, (2022); Eye to Eye, Peter Freeman, New York, NY (2021); Rear Window, White Cube (Online) (2020); and Sympathetic Magic, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA (2020). Alfest’s work is in the collections of the Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, TX; the Olbricht Collection, Berlin, Germany; Saatchi Gallery, London, United Kingdom; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, United Kingdom. She received the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award in 2006, and an award from the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation in 2004. Altfest’s forthcoming solo exhibition Forever will be on view at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN, May 31–September 1, 2025. 

Julien Domercq (b. 1987, Paris, France) is an art historian and curator living and working in London, United Kingdom. Domercq assumed the role of Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom, in early 2024. There he recently co-curated Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c. 1504 (2024), and is curating Kiefer/Van Gogh (2025), opening in late June. Previously, he was Associate Curator of Post-1800 Paintings (2021-24) at the National Gallery, London, United Kingdom, where he co-curated After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art (2023) and worked on the exhibition Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers (2024). He has remained as guest curator of the Gallery’s main Fall exhibition, Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists (2025), opening in September. Domercq was the inaugural Allen and Kelli Questrom Curator of Works on Paper and the Lillian and James H. Clark Assistant Curator of European Art (2019-2020) at the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX, where he curated exhibitions on Caravaggio and Frans Hals. Before his move to Texas, Domercq began his career at the National Gallery, London (2016-2018), where he curated the exhibition Drawn in Colour: Degas from the Burrell (2017) and assisted in organizing the show Painters’ Paintings: From Freud to Van Dyck (2016). He received a BA, History of Art, in 2010, and an MPhil, History of Art, in 2011, both from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Kiefer/Van Gogh, will be on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, June 28‒October 26, 2025, and Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists, at the National Gallery, September 13, 2025‒February 8, 2026.

#EllenAltfest