Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union

Anya Kielar

SELECTED WORKS BY Anya Kielar

Anya Kielar
Standing in Lavender

2007

Wood, paint, leather, museum board, ribbon,

231.3 x 91.4 cm

Anya Kielar
Mostly Ghostly

2007

Wood panel, paint, glitter, photocopy,

205.7 x 78.7 cm

Anya Kielar
Cold Cream

2007

Wood panel, paint, photocopy, museum board, paste, fabric, leather, aluminum foil

125.7 x 85.1 x 11.4 cm

Anya Kielar
The Geeks

2008

Wood panel, paint, fabric, inkjet prints

243.8 x 274.3 cm

ARTICLES

Art in Review; Anya Kielar
By Roberta Smith, New York Times

Anya Kielar's first solo show at this gallery was mostly histrionic paint-it-black graduate school art. Her second has traction; it updates aspects of early Dadaist and Surrealist photomontage, collage and assemblage with ad-agency sharpness and feminist, table-turning wit. The works combine flat and dimensional cutout images and found objects in varying ratios.

All depict women, the best with crisp, tangible vehemence that brings to mind Hannah H�ch crossed with Kembra Phaler, the performance artist known for her high black boots and fluorescent body paint. Surrealism is expertly rendered if a bit familiar in four free-form mannequins made of cutouts, bits of furniture and other objects and sometimes lights. ''Automaton'' is neo-Arcimboldo: a life-size figure pieced together from images of butterflies. ''Martha'' is a woman on all fours, whose torso is a three-drawer sewing cabinet that provides a rebellious uprightness.

More original are three large, dark collage-assemblages of crying women arrayed in shallow glass-fronted boxes; they sharply twist the woman-at-the-window motif with which painters have traditionally evoked prostitutes. Titles aside, these women have a totemic power and abstractness. Inside the boxes their various elements, which include paint-on-glass, fabric, net and cut-out paper and photographs, seem aligned but unattached. The subjects are in charge of their own construction in a protected space where movement and liberty seem possible.

Read the entire article here
Source: query.nytimes.com