Anastazie Anderson
Czech British
Born 1995 in Prague, Czech Republic
Working primarily in painting
Education
Royal College of Art, MA Painting (2021-2023)
Falmouth School of Art, Fine Art BA hons (2015 - 2018)
‘Anderson’s paintings, at first glance, appear neither real nor dreamed, neither fabricated nor sourced. They almost seem based on photographs of a place that never was, populated by people who never were, painted by someone struggling to remember the photographs themselves, now trying to capture the feeling of having seen them. Perhaps the best thing to call them would be mediated fantasies.
The complex lineage of the work goes some way in explaining its apparent contradictions. Pulling inspiration from home photography, the imagery of social media, cinematic iconography as well as the piled-up monographs of modernist masters, Anderson paints on large-scale canvas to make images sourced from photographs into grand, life-like scenes from a past history. The work has at once all the logical dissonance of a dream, yet all of a dream’s emotional assurance. Using interpolations of colour and flatness, naivete and realism in flux, and also taking from the tradition of hard-edge painting, Anderson blurs distinctions between authenticity and artifice, sincerity and irony, the personal and the communal, the imagined and the remembered.’