bellwethergallery.com - Ellen Altfest: Still Lives, by Roberta Smith, The New York Times.
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.

bellwethergallery.com - Ellen Altfest, Critics choice in Artforum
Since her debut show at Bellwether in 2002, Ellen Altfest has become decidedly more precise and yet, at the same time, considerably less so.

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Featuring 11 oil on canvas paintings and one life size pastel. All works were completed over three years, Altfest focuses her attention on natural objects both in the studio and in the landscape: cacti, a tumbleweed, and driftwood on the studio floor.

bellwethergallery.com - Time out review of Ellen Altfest
The list of Ellen Altfest’s subjects – driftwood, tumbleweeds, cacti – does not suggest a very lively artistic practice. Yet the painter makes the mundane enchanting in these 15 oil paintings (just three from 2005) and one work on paper, the results of three years of painstaking labor since her last solo show in 2002.

bellwethergallery.com - Ellen Altfest reviewed in the New Yorker
One of those huge, sliding, sheet-metal-covered doors that city dwellers know so well appears in the best picture in Altfest’s show; nestled next to it, where a rat or pile of recyclables should be, one finds a giant tumbleweed. Indeed, the whole series of craftily painterly, stubbornly realistic still-lifes stages a dialogue between the cactus-studded West and an East of peeling paint, imprisoned houseplants, and sooty rooftop views.

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New York Observer story on Ellen Altfest: ‘Altfest’s Austerity’

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Ellen Altfest, by Steven Stern, New York Absolute