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. 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, 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.
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. Her family lived throughout Europe, before moving to the United States when Harvey was in her teens. 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. 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, and several international venues. She also completed the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program and participated in PS1's National Studio Program.
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. 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. 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.
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.