Birds of Paradise Bouquet with Shells and Stones

39+ Art Space

About Artwork

Birds of Paradise Bouquet with Shells and Stones

2024, Oil on canvas, 203.2 x 177.8cm

For Californian artist Anna Valdez, people are products of their environments. Her practice is concerned with the material stories of objects, where the inanimate get to step into their own personification. The art-making process is how Valdez explores the connection between anthropological and artistic methods of cataloguing and record-keeping. Her works invite viewers to consider one’s surroundings as emblematic of personal and collective experience, in which still-lifes function as portraiture too.

Artist Profile

Anna Valdez (b. 1985, California, United States) is a multi-disciplinary artist who examines the relationship between objects, cultural formation, and collective consciousness. Creating epic tableaux in her studio, Valdez moves seamlessly between still life and landscape painting as she collects objects and makes new ones—throwing, firing, and glazing new ceramic vessels inspired by ideas for paintings, new plants or taxidermy, recent trips, or works in progress. Toggling between collection, creation, observation, and fictionalization, Valdez works with saturated hues and surprising scale shifts to communicate an abstract temporality. Layering the personal with the historical in dense compositions that collapse foreground and background, Valdez’s compositions resemble immersive installations.

Artist:

Anna Valdez

Medium:

Oil on canvas

Size:

203.2 x 177.8cm

Year:

2024