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.Huldisch, Henriette. "Tempting Failure," Ellen Harvey: The Museum of Failure, New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2015. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Miller, Nicole. "Ellen Harvey: Nostalgia," The Brooklyn Rail, 19 December 2017. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Kunitz, Daniel. "Painter Ellen Harvey's Latest Public Work Is a Love Letter to the Everglades," Cultured, 11 August 2017. Retrieved 29 October 2019. She frequently pairs traditional representational vocabularies and genres (landscape, portraiture) with seemingly antithetical postmodern strategies, such as institutional critique, appropriation, mapping and pastiche.Landi, Ann. "The Real Thing," ARTnews, June 2002.Wei, Lilly. "Ellen Harvey at Luxe," Art in America, December 2007.Volk, Gregory. "Spring in Dystopia," Art in America, May 2008. 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.Landi, Ann. "Breaking Laws & Mirrors," ARTnews, May 2006.Hall, Emily. "Ellen Harvey/Dodge Gallery," Artforum International, May 2012. Retrieved 29 October 2019.Hunter, Becky Huff. "Ellen Harvey: Barnes Foundation & Locks Gallery," Frieze, March 2016. Retrieved 29 October 2019. Curator Henriette Huldisch writes of her work, "haunted as it is by the notion of art's ultimate futility, her paradoxical stake is in persistently testing art's possibility to do something in the world after all."
Harvey has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris,Johnson, Ken. "So Here's the Concept: Copy a Whole Collection," The New York Times, 28 February 2003. Retrieved 18 October 2019. Corcoran Museum of Art,Pendle, George. "Ellen Harvey," Frieze, 11 October 2013. Retrieved 29 October 2019. Groeninge MuseumHaq, Nav. "Crushed by Too Much Love," The Unloved: Ellen Harvey (Tessa Rosebrock, et al.), Veurne, Belgium: Hannibal, 2014, p. 23–35. and Barnes Foundation,Cohen, David. "Ellen Harvey at the Barnes Foundation," artcritical, 13 December 2015. Retrieved 29 October 2019. and been featured in the Whitney, Prague and Kwangju Biennials,Levin, Kim. "Whitney Biennial," ARTnews, May 2008.Hoffman, Frank. "Report from Kwangju: Monoculture and Its Discontents," Art in America, November 2000. and shows at MoMA PS1,Herkenhoff, Paulo. "Ellen Harvey," Strangers/Etrangers, New York: PS1, 2001. Turner Contemporary,Cooke, Rachel. "Volcanoes and damp squibs," The Guardian, 10 April 2011, p. 32. the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary ArtKlein, Richard. "Extended Forecast," Weather Report, Ridgefield, CT: Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, 2019. and SMAK.Huldisch, Henriette. Ellen Harvey: The Museum of Failure, New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2015. Retrieved 18 October 2019. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.Greenberger, Alex. "John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Announces 2016 Fellowships," ARTnews, 6 April 2016. Retrieved 28 October 2019. 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.Sculpture Magazine. "Mirror Networks: A Conversation with Ellen Harvey," Sculpture, 24 May 2019. Retrieved 28 October 2019.Declercq, Aline. "Bossuit Church Wins Wivina Demeester Prize," Focus/WTV, 29 November 2016. Retrieved 29 October 2019. 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).Rosebrock, Tessa et al. The Unloved: Ellen Harvey, Veurne, Belgium: Cannibal, 2014. Retrieved 28 October 2019.Harvey, Ellen. New York Beautification Project, New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2021. Retrieved February 25, 2022.Harvey, Ellen. Ellen Harvey: The Disappointed Tourist, Köln Snoeck/Museum der Moderne Salzburg, 2021. Retrieved March 11, 2019. She lives with her husband and son in Brooklyn, New York.
Early life and career Harvey was born in 1967 in Farnborough, Kent, United Kingdom to German and British parents; her sisters are the poet Matthea Harvey and ecologist Celia Harvey.Finkelpearl, Tom and Valerie Smith. "Does the Breath Change As It Crosses the Divide: Ellen Harvey and Matthea Harvey in Conversation," Generation 1.5, New York: Queens Museum of Art, 2009. Her family lived throughout Europe, before moving to the United States when Harvey was in her teens.Schwob, Olivia. "Art Is a Dark Mirror," Harvard Magazine, May–June 2016. Retrieved 18 October 2019. She attended Harvard College (AB, History and Literature, 1989) and the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin in Germany (1990, no degree), before earning a JD from the Yale Law School in 1993.Weisberg, Jonathan T. "Not Your Typical Lawyer," Yale Law Review, Summer 2003, p. 33–41. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Kunitz, Daniel. "Streets Ahead," Art Review, October–November 2005. 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,Valdez, Sarah. "Ellen Harvey: Painting is a Low Tech Special Effect," Time Out New York, 29 June 2000.Bowles, Emily. "Ellen Harvey at De Chiara," Art in America, October 2002.Glueck, Grace. "Surface Tension," The New York Times, 8 October 1999, Section E, p. 37. Retrieved 28 October 2019. and several international venues.Ewing, Margaret. "Berlin: Ellen Harvey," Artforum, May 2010. Retrieved 29 October 2019.Weh, Vitus. "Hier ist Dort 2: Internationale Malerpositionen," Artforum International, April–May 2002. She also completed the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program and participated in PS1's National Studio Program.Momin, Shamin. A Whitney for the Whitney at Philip Morris, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003.
Harvey's early work examined art production conventions and the public desire for representational art.Schwendener, Martha. "Ellen Harvey: I See Myself," Time Out New York, 13 December 2001.Smith, Roberta. "Creativity Overhead, Underfoot and Even in the Air," The New York Times, 27 July 2001, Section E, p. 25. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Johnson, Ken. "Ellen Harvey," The New York Times, 14 December 2001. Retrieved 18 October 2019. She gained wide attention with her "New York Beautification Project" (1999–2001),Harvey, Ellen. New York Beautification Project, New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2005. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Ellen Harvey website. "New York Beautification Project," Retrieved 18 October 2019. which comprised 40 small, oval oil landscapes, illegally painted over graffiti-covered sites throughout New York City.Schneider, Daniel B. "F.Y.I.: Gems in the Rough," The New York Times, 18 February 2001, Section 14, p. 2. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Shattuck, Kathryn."Escaping a Date With the Wrecking Ball," The New York Times, 14 August 2005, Section 2, p. 4. Retrieved 18 October 2019. Choosing what she called "anodyne images," she sought to investigate the criteria behind value judgments about art, including what is popular or offensive, and how an artist's demographic relates to privilege.Gennochio, Benjamin. "Young and Provocative," The New York Times, 12 September 2004. Retrieved 18 October 2019.Honigman, Ana Finel. "Good Artist/Bad Artist: An Interview with Ellen Harvey," Art Journal, Fall 2005, p. 102–118.Smith, Valerie. " Ellen Harvey," Generation 1.5, New York: Queens Museum of Art, 2009. In reviews, The New York Times described these works as "hit-and-run pastoral scenes" that were painted with "the tenderness, glowing light and overlapping greens of the Hudson River School" and "turn[ed] street art on its head."
Work and reception
Throughout her career, Harvey has cycled between diverse media and themes. Her work can be loosely organized into recurrent motifs: self-portraits and portraiture, museum and archive works, ruins, and landscapes and mappings.Budak, Adam. "The Accident in the Mirror," Ellen Harvey: The Museum of Failure, New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2015, p. 298–303. Retrieved 18 October 2019.
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). ID Card Project (1998) was a diaristic collection of 25 small painted self-portraits copied from age 14-to-31 ID cards. For I See Myself in You (2001), Harvey dressed and posed adult friends to imitate theatrical childhood photographs of herself, then shot Polaroids and painted portraits from them, two for each original image.
100 Free Portraits and I Am a Bad Camera (both 2001) were wry explorations of the artist/sitter relationship.Wilson, Michael. "Picks: Screen," Artforum, 28 August 2001. 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. She revisited these ideas in her performance 100 Visitors to the Biennial Immortalized and her various "Invisible Self-Portraits" (2008, below), in which she painted her likeness in mirrors, obscured by a photographic flash.Vogel, Carol. "A Biennial Bustin’ Out of the Whitney," The New York Times, 29 February 2008. Retrieved 18 October 2019.de la Torre, Mónica. "Artists on Artists: Ellen Harvey," Bomb, Fall 2007.
Museum and archive works Harvey has often created deadpan copies, re-translations and collections of artworks or cultural materials to comment on the politics of selection, display, meaning and legitimacy in art. For A Whitney for the Whitney at Philip Morris (2003), she created a walk-in museum simulacrum: 394 postcard-sized reproductions of the museum's permanent art collection, copied from its catalogue and painted salon-style directly on walls wrapping around the museum branch gallery, itself framed in gold. Amid her copies, Harvey cut similarly sized slots into the walls, which revealed well-lit, recently acquired, actual artworks that critic Ken Johnson wrote, hovered with "hallucinatory vividness," creating a "magical play with differing dimensions of visual experience." Harvey's rote presentation—alphabetical, with reduction of all to small, brushy paintings—enacted what critics described as a humorous but aggressive leveling of hierarchies of quality and value and the presumed status of museums.