Sara Anstis uses sensuous soft pastels and oil paint to build worlds that set the stage for explorations of subjectivity, mythology, and ecology. Utilizing the visual language of folklore and dream, Anstis’s paintings and site-specific installations weave together surreal landscapes, deftly lit figures, anthropomorphic flora, and symbolic objects that vibrate both materially and narratively.
The indeterminate beings in Anstis’s landscapes are resolutely assertive of their autonomy even as they exist peripatetically and close to the margins of survival. As they hunt, swim, play, and rest, their interdependence with nature implies an order beyond comparisons with nineteenth-century European ideals of ‘civilization.’ Appropriately, Anstis’s works both celebrate and challenge the history of the nude. Rather than lacking in modesty, the artist describes her figures, whose bodies are shaped by smooth gradients of color, as “wearing the clothes of nakedness.” At times ambiguous in gender, their exaggerated biomorphic features drift occasionally into the realm of the aquatic or amphibian, speaking to the artist’s interest in the traditions of storytelling and the organic hybridity commonly used allegorically from Greek and Roman to Nordic myth. Working her surfaces with both softness and vigor, she renders their skin and hair as a material delight, entirely contributory to the complexity of reading a figure.
Anstis has had solo shows at Various Small Fires, Seoul; Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal; and Fabian Lang, Zurich. Recent group exhibitions include Kunsternerforbundet, Oslo; Kasmin Gallery, New York; Galerie Derouillon, Paris; Lyles & King, New York; and Palazzo Monti, Brescia. She has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, Jerwood Arts Bursary, and the Anna-Lisa Thomson Foundation amongst others.
[excerpted from Kasmin Gallery website: www.kasmingallery.com]
