Anna Ostoya at Bortolami

Bortolami is pleased to present Motions, an exhibition of new large paintings and collages by Anna Ostoya, our fifth exhibition with the artist. Derived from contours of the human body, the canvases show abstracted figures in movement. These silhouettes overlap, duplicate, and repeat, creating an illusion of action — running, jumping, floating, fighting or falling. Some seem violent, others vulnerable or ecstatic. Ostoya uses various media for each work, including oil paint, newspapers, printed images of protests sourced from the internet, metallic leaf, and plastic shopping bags.

In Motions, Ostoya advances the process she used in (UN)MADE (After Frenhofer) (2017), which she painted after spontaneously sketching the outline of her own body directly onto a canvas. The artist began the new works as a series of large-scale sketches which she then photographed and redrew into compositions. Groups of figures form a procession through various emotional and aesthetic universes, recalling the sequential elaborations of her earlier series, for example Transpositions (2014). The result is a series that reveals Ostoya’s distinct style and methods, invoking diverse art-historical traditions and alternating between a planned and unplanned creative process that freely employs painting, photography, and collage.

Anna Ostoya, born in Kraków, lives and works in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Zacheta National Gallery, La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, and CCA Kronika. Her work has been shown in Art on the Grid organized by the Public Art Fund, at Kunsthaus Baselland, at Tate St. Ives, the 2015 Lyon Biennial, at the Museum of Modern Art, the Power Plant Toronto, the CCS Bard College, Manifesta 7 Rovereto, and the Second Athens Biennial. She studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt/M and the Parsons School in Paris and attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. In Spring 2021 Mack Books will publish “Politics and Passions”, an art book by Ostoya and Chantal Mouffe.