Elisa Jensen

The job of the artist is not to reflect the chaos, but to offer the consolations of humanity, beauty, intellect, and community.
— Elisa Jensen

Working almost exclusively in oil, Elisa Jensen’s paintings combine the mystical qualities of nature, transcendental explorations of optics, and figurative depictions that reflect the artist's lived perspective and memories. Her subjects include: bucolic or mountainous landscapes, metropolitan environs and an array of their respective inhabitants, adolescent girls in moments of exploration, or play and more abstract paintings with otherworldly, mythical figures.

Jensen’s more recent work has shifted to explore interiors and vistas seen through windows. Shaded interiors and vibrant exteriors, or vice versa, have become her primary subject matter, and an exploration of the suffusion of light has taken flight. Either sunlight or moonlight bursts, twinkles, or gently falls into interiors, as the boundaries between outside/inside are diminished, and the symbiotic relation between the two is navigated. Often painted from memory, with brooding colors juxtaposing electric highlights and other unexpected chromatic arrangements, the viewer is pulled into intimate, metaphysical works that leave us oscillating between fiction and reality. Jensen brings the viewer into dreamlike, ethereal states, as the time of day, seasons and tides turn from canvas to canvas, whilst the same perspective is maintained. 

Elisa Jensen graduated from Smith College and the New York Studio School. She has had solo shows, and participated in group exhibitions at some of the following galleries: Pamela Salisbury Gallery, David & Schweitzer Contemporary, John Davis Gallery, Royal Danish Consulate General, and Morsø Kunstforening, in Denmark. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Academy Museum and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Jensen lives and works in Brooklyn, and teaches at both the Pratt Institute and the New York Studio School.