With their scrupulously rendered detail, unlikely juxtapositions, and tightly woven compositions, Ellen Altfest’s paintings comprise an intimate poetry of the everyday. This exhibition’s title is inspired by Emily Dickinson’s line “Forever – is composed of Nows,” an encouragement to live fully in the present. Turning inward, away from the noise, distractions, and inattentiveness that characterizes much of contemporary experience, Altfest’s work reinforces the importance of mindfulness both for the viewer and herself.

Working from direct observation, Altfest often takes months or sometimes more than a year to finish a painting. While they seem to describe scenes as they appear at a given instant, the artist’s images are actually distillations of their subjects as she perceives them over time. Even as they extend realist traditions of portraying still life, landscape, and the male nude, some of her paintings also seem minimalist or abstract—cryptic excerpts from such surfaces as skin, cloth, or bark recreated as flat planes of texture and pattern that cover the entire canvas.

The things Altfest depicts might seem of little consequence in our age of high drama. But by so intently focusing on the implacable surfaces of humanity and nature, cropping out everything that might distract from the subject’s essence, she encourages viewers to sharpen their own powers of observation in learning to value the poetry of everyday life.


About the Artist

Ellen Altfest lives and works in New York City and Rising Fawn, Georgia. She received an MFA from Yale University, Connecticut, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. She has completed residencies at SAGA House, Japan; the Zabludowicz Collection, Finland; the Bogliasco Foundation, Italy; and the Chinati Foundation, Texas. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at the Mori Art Museum, Japan, and the New Museum, New York. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, UK; the 55th Venice Biennale, Italy; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas; and the National Academy Museum, New York. Altfest is represented by White Cube, where she has had several exhibitions.

Organized by the Frist Art Museum


Ellen Altfest. Gourds, 2006–07. Oil on canvas; 19 x 38 in. © Ellen Altfest. Photo © Bill Orcutt, New York. Courtesy White Cube

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The Frist Art Museum is supported in part by

The Frist Foundation, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts

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Saturday, August 9, 2025, 10:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.

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Member Morning:
Venice and the Ottoman Empire, Ellen Altfest, and Fabric of a Nation

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