The Here and Now

Nashville's Frist Art Museum celebrates 20 years of Ellen Altfest.

- By Gina Teichert

Rock, Foot, Plant, 2009, oil on canvas, 9 x 14" Photo: Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy White Cube.

Imagine spending months in a forest painting a single pinecone, only to return a season later to complete the scene. Find a lichen or patch of moss and paint it at one-to-one scale. Describe a pile of gourds with such integrity they rot before your eyes. Dial in on a model and instead of painting the whole figure, focus on an interesting slice of anatomy complete with moles, veins and body hair. For Ellen Altfest, an artist known for her compact, rigorously detailed paintings, these works are as much about the passage of time as freezing it.

A survey of the artist's 20-plus year career, Ellen Altfest: Forever opens May 31 at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, and runs through September 1. Her work "is in some ways a remedy to the times," says chief curator Mark Scala, calling it "diligent and poetic and concentrated in a way—everything that most of us are not."

"You can see the deliberateness with which she will look at a tiny piece of the world and then put that tiny piece onto her brush," says Scala, describing Altfest's nearly physical transcription into paint. "There's something very special about that, something very much focused on the necessity of living in the here and now."

Borrowed View, 2022-23, oil on canvas, 10 x 914" Ellen Altfest. Photo: White Cube.

Altfest contemplates subjects like tumbleweeds and hair and bark, threaded together by technique, composition and equal reverence for every object in a scene. Her painting