Sara Anstis Joins Kasmin

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 begins her process by drawing the figures and later removes all but the most necessary formal elements. Using close cropping to evoke a productive claustrophobia, the gestures and expressions of her figures come into prominence, generating a potent atmospheric and psychological tension. It is during this conjuring process that her smaller symbolic objects begin to populate the paintings, curiously repeated by Anstis within her bodies of work—clues left like breadcrumbs in the dark.

In recent years, Anstis has moved fluently from working primarily with pastel on paper to realizing large-scale oil on canvas. The touch necessitated by pastel and the soft surface quality generated by the unmediated connection with the artist’s skin is translated into paint while retaining the sense of immediacy that is so integral to the artist’s surfaces. Linking the intimacy of the subject with that of the medium itself, Anstis further toys with the senses by depicting tender moments of touch between her figures, who are oftentimes depicted accompanied by furred animals, bristling with tactility. 

Throughout Anstis’s works, markers of nature and human form are disassembled and entwined. Fragments of highly pigmented landscapes are framed by the bodies within them, seen through the crook of an arm or beyond an arched back. The forest—a site of transformation, resonant with the metaphor of unconscious thought—reappears as processed or carved wood in many forms, and the enigmatic presence of water is ever-present, acting as a container or a shifting border to activities that play out within the picture plane. While these elements evoke a pastoral beauty that abounds with art historical references, there is an unmistakable wildness at play calling upon the darker truths of the natural world: the brutality of the elements, latent violence, and the presence of power differentials underscoring even the most affectionate of interactions between animals and humans alike.

Sara Anstis (b. 1991) is a Stockholm-born and Salt Spring Island raised artist. She received a BFA in Studio Art and Sociology at Concordia University (Montreal, CA) in 2013 and an MFA in Fine Art from Valand Academy (Gothenburg, SE) in 2016. In 2018, she completed the Drawing Year Postgraduate Programme at the Royal Drawing School (London, UK). Anstis has had solo shows at Various Small Fires, Seoul; Bradley Ertaskiran, Montreal; and Fabian Lang, Zurich. Recent group exhibitions include those held at Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo; Kasmin, 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.