Ellen Harvey

Ellen Harvey, New York Beautification Project (details), Forty 5" x 7" paintings in oil over graffiti,. Ellen Harvey (born 1967) is an American-British conceptual artist known for her painting-based practice and site-specific works in installation, video, engraved mirrors, mosaic and glass. She frequently pairs traditional representational vocabularies and genres (landscape, portraiture) with seemingly antithetical postmodern strategies, such as institutional critique, appropriation, mapping and pastiche. Her work examines such themes as art as a mirror, interactions between built environment and landscape, ruins and the Picturesque aesthetic, and cultural and economic relationships between museums, artists and publics. Corcoran Museum of Art, Groeninge Museum and Barnes Foundation, and been featured in the Whitney, Prague and Kwangju Biennials, and shows at MoMA PS1, Turner Contemporary, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art and SMAK. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has been awarded public commissions in New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, and her 2016 Belgian project, Repeat, won the Wivina Demeester Prize for Commissioned Public Art. Her work has been the subject of several books, including The Unloved: Ellen Harvey (2014), Ellen Harvey: Museum of Failure (2015), New York Beautification Project (2005/2021), and Ellen Harvey: The Disappointed Tourist (2021). She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn, New York. Her family lived throughout Europe, before moving to the United States when Harvey was in her teens. After practicing law for three years and painting in her free time, she turned to art full-time, establishing herself in solo and group shows at the Stux and De Chiara galleries, Brooklyn Museum of Art, PS1, Art in General,

Harvey's early work examined art production conventions and the public desire for representational art. She gained wide attention with her "New York Beautification Project" (1999–2001), which comprised 40 small, oval oil landscapes, illegally painted over graffiti-covered sites throughout New York City.

Self-portraits and portraiture Harvey's early figurative work explored the limits of representation, relationships between artist and public, memory, and the role or obsolescence of painting in a technological age. She often contrasted properties of painting (as labor-intensive, fallible, human, enduring) and photography (as immediate, indexical, machine-made, ephemeral, cheap). In the former, Harvey posed as a street-portraitist, offering 15-minute pencil portraits in exchange for written evaluations of the pictures; the latter was a 30-minute video of her hand drawing a portrait, projected onto a pad of paper and accompanied by the sitter's voiceover politely complaining about the likeness. Later installations of The Nudist Museum included a postcard display and the Nudist Museum Gift Shop, featuring portraits of kitsch objects formed out of nudes or body parts. Metal Painting (2015) was commissioned as a companion to an historical exhibition on metalwork at the Barnes Foundation. It consisted of 887 oil-on board, impasto silhouette portraits of each piece of metalwork in the collection. Magnetically mounted salon-style in an interlocking, movable arrangement, they reflected the museum founder's idiosyncratic curation of functional objects alongside Neo-Impressionist and early modernist paintings.

In her two-part Museum of Failure (2007–8, Whitney Biennial), Harvey catalogued the fraught nature of artistic coherence and communication. For the public art commission Repeat (2013, Bossuit Belgium), she "de-restored" a desanctified, post-WWI village church that had fallen into disrepair and disuse, removing the roof, interior pillars, and ritual furnishings and transforming it into a multi-use public square-artificial ruin; a new terrazzo floor incorporated schematic traces of the removed elements and a grey pattern evoking the shadows of the previous, ruined church after its bombardment. Based on the classical and neo-classical ruins they find worldwide—on display in The Pillar-Builder Archive (2013), a room of 4,000 alien-classified postcards of such structures—they wildly misinterpret humanity as an egalitarian, three-sexed, aquatic species unified by the building of pillars. Frieze'''s George Pendle described the show—which included a hand-painted, life-size Alien Souvenir Stand, a tour guide to actual DC sites, and a pillar-influenced alien space ship—as a "less bleakly dystopian than happily deranged" examination of the ubiquity of the classical in worldwide vocabularies of power and constructions of cultural memory.

Landscape and mapping works Ellen Harvey, Arcade/Arcadia (inside view), hand-engraved mirrors over LED screens, wood frame, 15' x 9' x 30', 2012. Harvey has employed landscape and mapping motifs in New York Beautification Project, multifaceted installations and public mosaics. Harvey built a skeletal version of Turner's London gallery, hung with 34 rear-illuminated, hand-engraved mirrors mimicking the exhibition at the time of his death, which depicted a panoramic view of the shabbier, contemporary Margate. The project's installation at Turner Contemporary (2021) consisted of over 220 paintings hung in an enormous grid and placed in dialogue with works by Turner (sketches of Roman ruins and coastal views of Margate). Frieze described its effect as "something quite mournful, like a wall of faces of missing people after a disaster." The project's installation at Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2021) was described as an attempt to "localize existential memories," mapping a spectrum that ranged from traumatic experiences (war, racism, and ecological disaster) to more mundane losses caused by technological change or gentrification. Harvey installed a 10-by-100-foot, mouth-blown mirror wall engraved with her painting of a satellite view mapping a diagonal swath of Florida from the Gulf of Mexico through the Everglades to Miami Beach and the Atlantic Ocean; reflecting visitors, the image seems to float in response to changing light conditions, alluding to Florida's intimate and uneasy relationship with its water table. She reworked the design for Atlantis into a 10 x 100-foot painting, Mermaid: Two Incompatible Systems Intimately Linked (2019), that more directly contrasts the natural with the man-made landscape. The mosaics Green Map (2019, San Francisco) and Mathematical Star (2013, Brooklyn, Marcy Plaza) used more metaphorical strategies, inverting traditional mapping to highlight only local protected natural spaces in the former, and representing the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in a quilt pattern of diamond designs based on photographs of eighteen neighborhood landmarks selected by the local community board in the latter.

Awards and collections Harvey has received fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation (2016), George A. & Eliza Gardener Howard Foundation (2019) and New York Foundation for the Arts/Lily Auchincloss Foundation (2002), as well as awards from the New York Community Trust (2007), Pew Charitable Trust (2004), Rema Hort Mann Foundation (2004) and Artists Space (2001). In addition to several artist residencies, she has been awarded public art commissions from New York Percent for Art, Philadelphia International Airport, U.S. Art in Architecture Program, She is represented by Locks Gallery (Philadelphia), Galerie Gebrüder Lehmann (Dresden, Germany), and Meessen De Clercq (Brussels, Belgium). New York Beautification Project'' (2005, 2021)