Sara Anstis: Small Works
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Kasmin is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the London-based artist Sara Anstis (b. 1991, Stockholm) titled Small Works, featuring a recent series of intimately scaled pastels. Anstis’s seductive renderings are suffused with subjectivity, depicting dream-like scenes of figures amid spare yet evocative environments. Across her compositions, Anstis’s method of storytelling is marked by the absence of a beginning or an end—her subjects appear caught in the act. Pulling from an array of literary and art historical references, the artist’s interpretations of ancient tales permeate the collection of works on view. The ambiguous motives that lie at the heart of Anstis’s figures strike a balance between detachment and reliance, a domain where touching and embracing is equally met with a reserved coolness. The artist’s protagonists share an aesthetic quality to those in illuminated manuscripts, arriving to the page in media res—existing in the very center of the narrative. Executed in silken gradients of earthen hued pastel, embedded deep into the surface of the paper by the artist’s fingers, the tactility of Anstis’s works is heightened by embroidered passages sewn into the otherwise smooth surface.
Accompanying the exhibition is a newly commissioned short story, Dam’s Island, written by author, playwright, and previous collaborator Vida Adamczewski for a special edition publication by Kasmin Books. Known for her inventive stylistic approach to prose, Adamczewski engages with a network of vivid and compelling narratives derived from Anstis’s world, transforming the artist’s compositions into living, speaking beings. -
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Sara AnstisSand Path, 2024pastel on paper15 3/4 x 29 7/8 inches, left
40 x 76 cm
15 5/8 x 5 1/2 inches, right
39.8 x 14 cm -
Staged in ritualistic scenes that quote mythic and medieval imagery alongside references to early iconographic Renaissance painting, Anstis’s works on paper possess a fabled relationship to time that favors allegorical and symbolic modes of representation. Influenced by the detailed panels of fifteenth-century Florentine painter Pesellino (1422–1457), Anstis’s idiosyncratic scenes are similarly populated with several characters whose bodies relate to one another in incongruous scales. Bound together in anxious, pleasurable states, the various manifestations of Anstis’s diaristic guises include pregnant bodies, embryonic dogs, bulbs in the process of becoming, and other fertile imagery. At times, the gaze of these personae address the viewer directly; at others they occupy a more inward landscape as if engaged in some personal, secreted rite. Across the trance-like meditations of her figures, Anstis exacts a series of uncanny and mysterious tableaux in which nature and human form are disassembled and entwined.
Sharing the formal proportions of a cassone, or marriage chest, the diptych Sand Path (2024) pictures a procession of lithe figures, boneless and supple, as they search forward—some carried prostrate by their pale companions, others seeking shelter, some making eye contact with the viewer. The women and ambiguously gendered figures pictured in this panoramic expanse forge a trail toward the adjacent leaf of paper beyond the gap, which carries a totemic mass of biophilic forms. Neither the group nor the gravity-defying pile appear aware of the other; amnesia overtakes them before washing up on the artist’s shore. -
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In Woodwose (2024), the medieval trope of depicting ‘wild’ men, a gendered mythic creature believed to exist in forests beyond the reach of civilization, is portrayed through a branchless tree that instead supports two female figures. In contrast to the absent male body, the women are entwined with the pictorial tradition of the legend—with nature itself as a stand-in—as well as recall a traditional stylistic representation of Madonna and child. Depicting only the necessary symbols needed to signify the landscape, a simple white circle describes a full moon against a field of oxidized red. The prevalence of the ‘woodwose’ served as a cautionary tale in the Middle Ages, though the aspiration of being one with nature was embraced by the Renaissance—a myth Anstis traces to the present. While the cultural understanding of the narrative has assumed different connotations over centuries, it remains a reminder of the human desire to relate to the elemental, subconscious, and feral parts of the self. In a further gesture of tactility, the ground of the image is embroidered with subtle passages of delicate thread.
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In Fishmonger (2024), a single figure stares out beyond a screen of amoebic fish strung up by their tails, their black glass eyes echoing the androgynous red-head’s gaze. Picturing three women’s bodies, the structure of Waders (2024) recalls a trinity. Only two of their expressions are visible, the other’s face perhaps concealed behind the two frontal torsos. The limbs of the bathers, another art historical trope, are pierced by small ties of string that appear to pin them to the water, almost mounted in a style one would a taxidermy butterfly. Upon closer inspection, we see a detached visage—a profile that stands between the two female heads, phantasmic and spectral.
The sea, like the forest, is often used in psychology to unveil the primordial parts of the patient’s psyche unbeknownst to them—vast and enigmatic domains capable of holding veiled truths. While the covert face in Waders may invoke the presence of the artist, it could be said that all the compositions contain a type of hidden self-portrait. As Anstis discloses through her figures, each a collection of selves, the drawn world is its own place. -
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About the Artist
Portrait of Sara Anstis by Benjamin McMahon. -
Publications
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Les Lalanne: Zoophites
From the Collection of Caroline Hamisky Lalanne
Curated by Paul B. Franklin April 4 – May 9, 2024 509 West 27th Street, New YorkAn exhibition in homage to the acclaimed French sculptors Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, drawn entirely from the collection of their eldest daughter, Caroline Hamisky Lalanne. Les Lalanne: Zoophites will include major works by these inventive artists who consistently defied art-world conventions. To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Les Lalanne’s first joint solo exhibition, which opened in Paris in June 1964, this exhibition borrows the title Zoophites, an obsolete French term for invertebrate animals that resemble plants in their appearance or growth patterns. The exhibition will be accompanied by a newly commissioned text by curator Paul B. Franklin. -
William N. Copley: LXCN CPLY
April 4 – May 11, 2024 297 Tenth Avenue, New YorkWilliam N. Copley: LXCN CPLY will explore the artist’s repertoire of recurring imagery and is the first exhibition to center Copley’s development of his signature visual language. LXCN CPLY draws this thread through five decades of the artist’s career, focusing on a selection of exemplary paintings and drawings from the late 1940s through the 1990s, alongside archival material, documentation and key objects relating to the work on view. The exhibition is co-organized with the William N. Copley Estate, which Kasmin has represented since 2010.
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