ANYA PESCE

Anya Pesce’s work has evolved over the years from abstract painting towards a formal research, focused on the different expressive possibilities of the Polymethyl Methacrylate. Her career began with painted plastic, with large-volume installations, and then focused on the plasticity of the material. Anya Pesce’s works are imbued with movement and dynamism and a sense of wonder thanks to the unlimited possibilities that plastic offers. The artist addresses the nature and energy of the inorganic world and the creative potential released by plastic.

While practicing concepts associated with painting, Anya Pesce’s work is identified more as sculpture. The themes explored hint at the world of fashion and design and refer to the Finish Fetish movement, a style related to LA Look, pop art, minimalism, light and space, born in Southern California in the 1960s, characterized by the use of industrial materials with shiny and reflective surfaces.

To create her works, the artist heats up Polymethyl Methacrylate in an industrial oven and then works it by hand; once it is heated, the material has a limited processing time until it is malleable. It is during this short period of time that the artist proceeds to bend the plastic until it reaches the desired shape. It is an approach to creation that emphasizes the uniqueness and individuality of the work itself, manipulating the material in a unique way, as the sculptures are not made from pre-existing prototypes.

The artist focuses on the surface, the skin of the work, which she freely manipulates through texture, achieving various effects between shiny, matt and satin. Her intention is to express a kind of hyper-reality within the material, to enhance its beauty, its sensory perception and its visual and tactile qualities as well.

Colour is often chosen by symbolic association, such as red, with its radiant and vital energy, the preciousness of gold and its reference to transcendence, the purity of white contrasting with the depth of black. Since 2015 these are the main colours used by the artist, who has now expanded the palette to include the entire colour spectrum.

The organic circular shapes contrast with the rigid geometry of the squares and create a visual score that, although in their mutual differences, share an underlying harmony and speak to us of an art as growth, that develops and changes and that is always susceptible to variation.

The fluidity of her works acts in direct contrast to the rectilinear sheets of acrylic in their original state because the artist’s aim is also to camouflage the industrial nature of the material; moreover, the folds suggest  the fabric and create drama by increasing the reflected light and the contrasts on the surface of the work.

In her plastic research, Anya Pesce investigates the sensuality of forms and the seductive shine of the material, in terms of colour, light and space; her works are sculptures inhabited by an internal force, by a free, fluctuating and pulsional magma. In this perspective, the fetish object, the “Fold Fetish”, is the work that deconstructs its traditional aura, its illusory quality, to shine as an object in itself, celebrating the sacredness of matter, which is subjected to the artist’s desire.

It is a language that shifts the focus to the relevance of the vital charge of the forging gesture through the truth and spontaneity of the creative moment. Her works are surfaces in motion that oscillate between solidity and transparency, geometry and haphazardness, between a full and empty space, in an aesthetic perceived in the exact instant in which the body of the work comes to light, and on which the artist ritually proposes the adventure of life, always in search of perfection.

Anya Pesce lives and works in Sydney, Australia. She has been exhibiting since 2011. Recent exhibitions include: 2023 Art & Design Florence Biennale, Florence. Italy; 2023 Art In Mind, Brick Lane Gallery, London UK; 2023 Sydney Contemporary, Carriageworks, Sydney. Australia; 2023 Surface Fetish, M Contemporary solo exhibition, Sydney, Australia; 2022 Finish Fetish, M Contemporary solo exhibition, Sydney, Australia; 2021 Oceania and Auckland Art Fair, FHE Galleries, New Zealand; 2021 Only Women, International Biennale of Non-Objective Art (Satellite Blue Mountains), Factory 49, Sydney, Australia; 2020 Anya Pesce COVID-19. Personal M Contemporary, Sydney; 2021 Orbit, Mona Foma, Tasmania; 2019 30 x 30: pret-à-porter. Abstract Gallery Space, Paris, France; 2019 New Modern RNOP-The Road Paintings. Fivewalls, Melbourne, Australia; 2017 Supermarket Art Fair, Stockholm, Sweden. Her works are part of numerous national and international public and private collections.