Kia ora and welcome to Anita DeSoto:Art. Here you can find a collection of some of my favourite figurative oil paintings, current exhibitions, prints and dioramas.
BIOGRAPHY: New Zealand artist Anita DeSoto lives in Waitati, Dunedin and has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for the last 15 years. She has a Master of Fine Arts and has been lecturing in Drawing and Painting at the Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic since 2004.
In recognition of her contribution to the New Zealand visual arts she was awarded an arts residency in the Leipzig International Art Program for three months in Leipzig, Germany 2010. In 2014, she was artist in residence at the New Pacific Studios in Vallejo, San Francisco, 2014 and the recipient of the William Hodges fellowship in Southland for 2018
DeSoto paints intuitively and gesturally, blurring or smearing the images; The oil paint drips and distorts surrounding forms and give her work a ghostly feel or one of motion or a fleeting moment.
The work is brilliantly coloured yet mimics aging historic photographs and focuses on the tableau as a narrative device deployed in figurative painting to portray historical events and the re-interpretation of such events, thus opening windows on appropriation aimed at the invocation of memory and pathos around the intergenerational history of women once marginalized but now re-evalued.
Represented by Gallery De Novo. Stuart St, Dunedin https://www.gallerydenovo.co.nz
IMAGE: Detail of Nativity, based on a photograph by Justin Speirs. Oil paint on aluminium panel. 1200x2200mm 2018
BIOGRAPHY: New Zealand artist Anita DeSoto lives in Waitati, Dunedin and has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for the last 15 years. She has a Master of Fine Arts and has been lecturing in Drawing and Painting at the Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic since 2004.
In recognition of her contribution to the New Zealand visual arts she was awarded an arts residency in the Leipzig International Art Program for three months in Leipzig, Germany 2010. In 2014, she was artist in residence at the New Pacific Studios in Vallejo, San Francisco, 2014 and the recipient of the William Hodges fellowship in Southland for 2018
DeSoto paints intuitively and gesturally, blurring or smearing the images; The oil paint drips and distorts surrounding forms and give her work a ghostly feel or one of motion or a fleeting moment.
The work is brilliantly coloured yet mimics aging historic photographs and focuses on the tableau as a narrative device deployed in figurative painting to portray historical events and the re-interpretation of such events, thus opening windows on appropriation aimed at the invocation of memory and pathos around the intergenerational history of women once marginalized but now re-evalued.
Represented by Gallery De Novo. Stuart St, Dunedin https://www.gallerydenovo.co.nz
IMAGE: Detail of Nativity, based on a photograph by Justin Speirs. Oil paint on aluminium panel. 1200x2200mm 2018
