Various Small Fires is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Sara Anstis, the artist’s first with the gallery and in Asia. Bundle offers a glimpse inside the artist’s world through recent works on paper and canvas.
Anstis' figures inhabit an environment ripe with dreamlike elements. Each naked body, rendered in brilliantly colored pigments, exudes both vulnerability and authority. An aura of sensuality is developed by the artist’s use of soft pastels. For the artist, the act of rubbing and touching has become a means for finding her work through an unmediated connection between her fingers and the papers skin-like surface. Paintings on canvas, a more recent development in her practice, translate the artist’s touch on a grander scale and in an equally enticing manner.
The figures in these works are almost always in a state of embrace: an arm caressed around a shoulder, or the reassuring touch of a hand. These emblems of tenderness and care speak to a sense of solidarity shared by the figures of Anstis’s otherworldly universe while also signaling profound relationships between them. The nature of these relationships are open for interpretation, though a number of works suggest Anstis’ interest in the complicated nature of maternal bonds. More ambiguously, they also speak of characters grappling with their connection to the landscape they occupy, as well as with the intricacies of surrogacy, loneliness and bloat. There is an emphasis on the difference in scale between entities and the power imbalances affecting them. In Small Mother (all works 2021), a large, pregnant woman tenderly holds a smaller adult figure in a composition reminiscent of the Madonna and Child.
The exhibition’s largest work, Moonflower, encapsulates a surreal tone that rings throughout. Three figures sit before a dark background: one painted in a vibrant bloody red reaches to her neighbor while the third points out a wound on her leg.
