Elena Unger (Artist) Interview
Painter of the apocalypse: Artist Elena Unger on visions, the Angel of History and art as ritual.
Elena Unger calls herself a painter of the apocalypse—not as spectacle, but as a lens for truth. As a painter and installation artist she moves fluently across sculpture, sound, film, and site-specific work, shaping what she calls “extra-liturgical” spaces where apocalyptic imagery can breathe. In this episode of Transmute Tapes we explore why collapse and revelation keep returning in her practice; how images arrive fully formed, like waking dreams; and what it means for art to act as witness, archivist, and ritual at the same time.
Elena describes the instant an image lands and the small rituals she uses to catch it before it fades. We talk about why “the end” isn’t an aesthetic, but a way to sharpen attention, ethics, and a stubborn kind of hope. From Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, refracted through Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, she draws a working philosophy for the studio—testimony to the fragments that progress leaves behind.
Our conversation moves through historic craft and sacred sujets made urgent in the present tense, then traces the braid of her training at Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths, and in Philosophical Theology at Cambridge, and how those languages meet in practice. From there we talk about art and the sacred: when an exhibition becomes ritual, how communal attention might be rebuilt in a culture designed to splinter it, and why devotion sometimes looks like miniature painting—editing the infinite, deciding what not to render, finding the line between revelation and noise.
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Shownotes:
Elena Ungers Website:
Elena on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/elenaungerart
Elenas upcoming exhibition in the Pontone gallery:
https://pontonegallery.com/exhibitions/185-elena-unger-the-angel-of-history
