Ellen Bashford

Ellen Bashford is a self-taught painter based in Hackney, East London who began painting in 2019 alongside a career in arts publishing. Working mainly in acrylic painting, her work, created in shallow relief with modelling paste, immerses the viewer in saturated, abstract forms and fantastical scenes, drawing on the geometric shapes and colour palettes of Modernist movements and the acts of Surrealists.

These influences are synthesised into sometimes humorous and absurd compositions that set vibrant, painted figures and objects against textured backgrounds. The resulting paintings, of landscapes and scenes real and imagined, are populated with lively interactions between biomorphic forms. Suggestive of such scenes as dinners, gatherings of people, landscapes or outer space, the combined effect represents an instinctive relationship to space and form.

Bashford’s work is an imaginative submersion into a world of colour and movement, layered and textured with hidden meaning.