Perrotin Tokyo is happy to current Tub, a solo exhibition of work and works on paper by London-based artist Sara Anstis (b. 1991 Stockholm). That is her first presentation with the gallery.
Sara Anstis’ otherworldly scenes—the place figures, typically nude, commune amongst themselves and within the firm of animals— current a dreamlike logic that may be partially decoded by means of a contextual viewing of artwork historical past. Precedents to Anstis’ imaginative worlds embody these throughout the Surrealist motion, however her personal pursuits stretch a lot additional again and incorporate a large swath of visible and thematic sources. Figurative fragments redolent of the medieval and early renaissance merge with symbolist parts and tones that recall colour principle and geometric abstractions from the mid-Twentieth century.
A big a part of Anstis’ creative output consists of works on paper the place she has developed a pronounced sense of materiality—because of each the feel of her chosen floor, toothy watercolor paper, and to the hazy layer of pliable pastels she lays on prime. The outcomes of this thought-about layering are saturated two-dimensional photos that seem to vibrate off the web page. This exhibition marks the primary time that Anstis presents work on wooden panels, through which materiality as soon as once more takes a central function, this time projecting the panel’s woodgrain by means of the layer of pigment and making a composited impact that merges substrate and paint in equal measure.
In Operating, Crimson, a nude girl passes by means of the body along with her gaze firmly mounted in the direction of the viewer. Behind her, in a hellscape the place fires burn within the distance, are a number of extra figures in numerous states of undress transferring in the identical path. Calling to thoughts Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Dulle Griet (a monumental portray whose environs owe a big debt in the direction of Hieronymus Bosch, the place the central feminine warrior determine Boring Griet leads a mob of girls to pillage Hell), Anstis’ employment of the character’s mounted gaze feels decidedly modern—a tool that seems to interrupt the fourth wall of her conjured scene, permitting it to freeze time. In a divine flash we’re caught in a second, and as a substitute of being a mere bystander to the occasions, we’re pressured to interact with the scene earlier than us. The road between nudity and nakedness isn’t clear and Anstis asks us to look nearer to search out our personal solutions.
Lots of Anstis’ scenes seem to current cryptic parables, the place the connection and values between the figures, their environments, and ourselves is one we attempt to work out as we peer upon them. A dour clothed determine dominates the foreground of Dinner Desk, standing subsequent to an empty plate on a desk. Behind is a nude girl, one arm outstretched. The narrative isn’t crystalline however suggestive and questions abound. All through the exhibition, a theme of fixed revealing and concealing turns into clear. In Laundry, Anstis locations a layered line of otherwise coloured materials earlier than a determine whose elongated neck suggests a level of undress. The materials work as a tool to hide her physique, and once more ask us to contemplate the scene’s story. Equally, the tub in Tub conceals the our bodies of its three inhabitants, who gaze in the direction of us contentedly from inside its protecting confines. The painter is a presence mirrored within the mirror above the tub whose eyes are hid by a drawing desk however whose gaze is on the market by means of her rendering of your entire scene.
The present’s title, Tub, remembers many photos from an extended line inside artwork historical past, nevertheless it was the thought of a shower within the Roman sense that allowed Anstis to attach the quotidian bathtub to her visions of a sulfuric underworld. This thread—that pulls us from the home to the infernal and again once more—is tangible all through the exhibition, and proof of an artist whose imaginative and prescient is all-encompassing, absorbing, and beguiling. —James Casey
