ELISA JENSEN
INVITATION
March 12 - April 11, 2026

Opening Reception Thursday, March 12, 6-8 PM

Elisa Jensen, Candle on Ellen’s Table, 2026, 50 x 40 inches, Oil on wood panel

Windows hold a particular fascination for painters. As a subject, a space within a space, they allow for digression and contrast– a kind of shift in modes. A window’s presence in a painting also neatly sets up a structural echo of the painting itself, and sparks a natural reaction to look outward or into. For the past few years Elisa Jensen has chosen windows as her central subject, painting from life and memory interiors from three locations: her Brooklyn house; Riverview, her now vacated childhood Westport home; and Ejerslevvej, her Aunt and Uncle’s house in Denmark on an island in northern Jutland.

Grounded in the familiarity of these settings, in which every surface and each time of day’s play of light is known, Jensen’s paintings open window-wise into a subtle wildness of color and distant space. With their remarkable tone and color passages, and their unmistakable “stillness” – we sense the silence of these rooms – Jensen’s work has rightly drawn comparison to Pierre Bonnard and to the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi.* In works like Riverview Winter it is not only the palette that suggests a thoughtful internalization of past masters, but the dazzlingly complex space that unfolds from the windowed view, rolling away in winter-sunset grays, unexpectedly advancing in a rectangle of snow’s delicate undertone of ultramarine. By contrast, in Riverview, Lights Across the River, the progression of the outdoor space is stately and precise, measuring out the depths of a night view with a softly-marked glow, a brush of clear orange against indigo. 

From this framework of tradition, Jensen is able to convey a powerful emotional quality that feels distinctive and personal. As is often the case in painting, it is an emotion that hovers, open-endedly and somewhat mysteriously, around the subject. We wonder as viewers what associations these interiors might be holding, what is implied by Jensen’s recurring interest in the room-to-window passages she traces with such range in each work. 

It is moving to see these paintings within the context of Jensen’s wider interests as a painter, which have included stark northern landscapes (the settings of her ancestors) to scenes of her daughters caught in the transience of childhood. She has also explored  timeless and symbolic Celtic and Scandinavian imagery: ghostly ships, otherworldly birds ascending, birth and skeleton scenes that speak to the passage of generations, emotional cycles of loss, hope, and revival. Jensen’s very deliberate current focus on quiet interiors, replete with painterly vitality and care, suggests that similar subject matter can perhaps be addressed closer to home. The windows of her paintings ultimately act as prompts, moving us from what is fixed, known, and interior through to a space of ever-changing color and light. They are the “Invitation” of the exhibition title, chosen by the artist, taken from lines of Mary Oliver:

“But also I say this: That light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive” **

— Christina Kee

*Anna Shukeylo, “Tradition Goes On: To The Studio at JJ Murphy Gallery”, Art Spiel, February 9, 2026.
**Mary Oliver, Poppies, first published in New and Selected Poems: Volume One, Beacon Press, 1992.