Museum Exhibition

Ellen Altfest at Frist Art Museum

Posted: 24 April 2025

Ellen Altfest. *Green Spot*, 2017. Courtesy of Laura Zhou Xiaowen, Shanghai. © Ellen Altfest. Photo: White Cube (Christopher Burke, New York)

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31 May – 1 September 2025

Nashville, Tennessee

Opening at Frist Art Museum, Nashville this May, ‘Forever’ is an exhibition by the painter Ellen Altfest. Featuring 22 works created over the last two decades, Altfest who paints directly from observation over time, meticulously renders the surface qualities of objects that are often overlooked in everyday life. As described by the Frist curator Mark Scala, ‘her close looking and technical virtuosity yield a near hallucinatory clarity. But her images are also products of invention, as evidenced by curious cropping, juxtapositions of subject matter, and art-historical allusions’.

‘Forever’ presents a distilled visual poetry. Inspired by the Emily Dickinson poem, ‘Forever – is composed of Nows’, the exhibition is an encouragement to live mindfully in the present.