Ellen Harvey. The Disappointed Tourist

October 23, 2021—February 20, 2022

Ellen Harvey (Farnborough, GB, 1967) is a painter, cartographer, conceptual artist, and much more. Her media range from classical oil painting to drawing, from mirror engraving to sculptural installations and works in public settings. Her creations offer critical observations on how we perceive art, the social space that it occupies, and the role it plays in holding a mirror up to society. Humor and spectacle often serve her as devices that seduce the beholders into changing their way of thinking.

The Disappointed Tourist is Harvey’s first solo show in Austria. It takes its title from a series: since 2019, Harvey has painted places that people name in response to a question she asks online—“Is there a place that you have always wanted to visit or revisit that no longer exists?” The project seeks to localize existential memories, mapping a spectrum that ranges from traumatic experiences like war, racism, and ecological disasters to the more mundane losses inflicted by technological change or gentrification, from cultural sites of the first rank to deeply personal favorite spots, from locales that disappeared only recently to the vanished wonders of antiquity.

Ellen Harvey is still accepting proposals for the Salzburg exhibition at disappointedtourist.org