She graduated from Cornell University with a BFA in Painting and a BA in English 1993, an MFA in Painting from Yale 1997, and an ME from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.



The compression of time -- spent looking, thinking and working -- in Ms. Altfest's strange, unflamboyant surfaces manages to feel both steeped in tradition and startlingly fresh,Close-up views of cactuses at first seem generic, but their flattened space creates a taut and exciting strange figure-ground tension. This tension tightens further in ''Log on Studio Floor,'' in which the mottled surface of a rough gray chunk of wood all but blends with the paint-splattered wood surface beneath it; everything is reduced to paint on canvas.

Twin obsessions with paint and nature collide and collude over the course of the 10 small and smallish canvases in Ellen Altfest's promising first New York gallery show. A fluctuating realism leavened with a strong interest in abstraction results: Andrew Wyeth can come to mind; so can Ivan Albright, Lucien Freud, Vija Celmins and even Jackson Pollock.

In ''Tumbleweed,'' a profusion of delicate branches offer the natural equivalent of Pollock's all-over painting. The ''Green Plant'' depicts a lush plant hanging in a window overlooking a thick wood and forces you to sort through disorienting jumps in space and scale.Consistency is provided by deliberate surface texture, a palette that tends toward monochrome and a rigorously controlled space. It is also important to note that the artist paints from life, whether outdoors or in her studio.

Studio Window at Night'' (from 2003, the earliest work in the show) presents an unusually open, illusionistic view of New York tenements anchored by a crusty window frame in which trompe l'oeil accuracy and paint as paint duel to a draw. The show's tour de force mixes a nighttime view of a row of plants on a window sill with the reflections of both the plants and the painting of them.

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Ellen Altfest