18 Facts About Ellen Harvey

Ellen Harvey was born on 1967 and is an American-British conceptual artist known for her painting-based practice and site-specific works in installation, video, engraved mirrors, mosaic and glass.

Ellen Harvey 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.

Ellen Harvey's family lived throughout Europe, before moving to the United States when Harvey was in her teens.

Ellen Harvey attended Harvard College and the Hochschule der Kunste, Berlin in Germany, before earning a JD from the Yale Law School in 1993.

Ellen Harvey completed the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program and participated in PS1's National Studio Program.

Ellen Harvey gained wide attention with her "New York Beautification Project", which comprised 40 small, oval oil landscapes, illegally painted over graffiti-covered sites throughout New York City.

Ellen Harvey often contrasted properties of painting and photography.

For I See Myself in You, Ellen 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.

Ellen Harvey revisited these ideas in her performance 100 Visitors to the Biennial Immortalized and her various "Invisible Self-Portraits", in which she painted her likeness in mirrors, obscured by a photographic flash.

Ellen 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.

Collection of Impossible Subjects featured a rear-illuminated mirror wall, hand-engraved with a salon-style collection of ornately framed, glowing sanded-out rectangles; visible through one opening was Invisible Self-Portrait in My Studio, a large trompe l'oeil painting depicting identically framed, rendered studio snippets and self-portraits based on photographs Ellen Harvey took in a mirror, with camera flashes obscuring her face.

In several mirrored installations, Ellen Harvey re-imagined her sites in elegiac, science-fiction-like, ruined states.

Reforestation superimposed a mirrored engraving of post-digital-age ruins littered with electronic equipment over the reflected image of an actual Internal Revenue Service office; outside, Ellen Harvey installed Fossils, carved white-marble sculptures featuring fossilized vestiges of the same technology.

Ellen Harvey has employed landscape and mapping motifs in New York Beautification Project, multifaceted installations and public mosaics.

Ellen 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.

Ellen Harvey reworked the design for Atlantis into a 10 x 100-foot painting, Mermaid: Two Incompatible Systems Intimately Linked, that more directly contrasts the natural with the man-made landscape.

Ellen Harvey's work belongs to public collections from around the world, including the Whitney Museum, Hammer Museum, Art Omi, Berkeley Art Museum, Center for Contemporary Art, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Gwangju Art Museum, Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, Princeton Art Museum, and Wyspa Institute.

Ellen Harvey is represented by Locks Gallery, Galerie Gebruder Lehmann, and Meessen De Clercq.