The Vienna-based artist was born in Hamburg in 1971.
She studied painting and intermedia design at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart.
Ellen Semen creates collages and collage-like paintings.
She is known for her depictions of fight scenes and violence with pop aesthetics, which form unusual combinations. However, the pictures are only naive and comic-like at first glance.
Violence and horror are often concealed behind vegetal scenes or ornamental patterns. Reality and phantasms, beauty and cruelty permeate each other and prevent a hasty interpretation.
Ellen Semen's new pictures, however, have become more peaceful and sweet. Dream scenes and love scenes are transformed, in which spring and summer take place simultaneously. Tulips bloom at the same time as apples ripen, as in "Asimo and Eva", where the Honda robot Asimo offers the snake charmer Eva an apple.
Found, seemingly familiar things are altered and composed in a different context.
The painting is not a reproduction, but a transformation of reality and the unbroken desire for a regressive correction of the found reality.