Exhibition Details

MARC STRAUS is pleased to present Shallow Purple, our inaugural solo exhibition of new paintings by Anna Nero. Anna Nero (b. 1988, Moscow), lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany. Nero is interested in the ways we see and interpret the material world around us, how we relate to objects – physically, emotionally, and psychologically – and what meanings and power we choose to attribute to them. She starts her paintings with a loose gesture, then uses the initial movement to ignite her imagination to create novel objects and spaces that have a sense of familiarity. The imagined objects appear floating in front of and in between the spatial layers of the picture plane. Smooth, flat surfaces and sharp edges alternate with dynamic gestural strokes and soft spray-painted lines. She implies the materiality of these unidentifiable objects (paper, fabric, metal) only to immediately defy them through unexpected choices of form and placement. In Blue Velvet, a purple paper roll floats in the centre while a playfully sprayed line coils above it, mimicking its movement. A shiny blue stripe runs through the different planes of the picture, committing to hard angles only to submit to the invitation of a curvy crimson brushstroke in the end. A glimpse of a loosely painted, watery layer peeks through on the right.
Through her use of bright and often pastel colours and curvilinear forms, objects become sensual, languid, and playful; they are quixotic, dynamically pulsing in a field of more formal structures. There’s often a sense of figuration – or at least an allusion to figuration – with implied arms or legs posing and teasing. If Nero’s paintings are windows, we are looking inwards through them. Her compositions seem to oscillate between the constructed and the intuitive, the strict and the playful, and the real and the abstract.
Nero’s work has a surrealistic quality. In the 80’s there was a surfeit of painting movements with neo as a prefix, that quickly came in and out of fashion: Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Surrealism, Neo-Geo. Neo-Surrealism, with artists such as Jed Garet and Mark Kostabi, harked closer to the language and imagery of Dada with more defined human figuration and oddities. Nero’s work leans much further to the abstract, in which brushwork, tonality, and palette are critical and current. Her forms, while carrying psychological weight, are in the service of providing structures for the ongoing experimentation and growth of one of our important young abstract painters today.
Nero received her MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig in 2015, followed by post-graduate studies with Professor Heribert C. Ottersbach. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in the United States at Long Story Short, NYC (formerly known as Another Place, NYC), Germany, and Italy, and in several group exhibitions across Europe, Asia, and North America. She co-runs the Frankfurt-based project and exhibition space MARS. In 2022 she was a guest professor at the Art Academy Mainz, Germany. Her work is in private and public collections in Italy, Germany, Spain, and the US, including the G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, Germany; the Museum of Fine Art Leipzig, Germany; the Public Art collection of the State of Saxony; the Sammlung Zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (German National Art Collection); and the public art collection of the City of Frankfurt, Germany; Hudson Valley MOCA, Peekskill, NY, amongst others.
An opening reception will be held on Sunday, June 11th from 4 to 7 PM at the gallery. The artist will be present. Viewing hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 11 AM to 6 PM. Summer viewing hours, beginning in early July will be Tuesday through Friday, 11 AM to 6 PM.