New Paintings by Anna Kunz Featured in CHROMA EXHIBITION through April 13th

Color, form, and surface are the fundamental elements that Anna Kunz plays with when approaching a painting. She is deeply invested in the power of paintings to connect people and to create experiences through her art and installations.

Kunz lives and works in Chicago where she was born and raised. She earned a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Northwestern University. Her artwork has been honored in numerous national and international collections, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Artadia Chicago, Rema Hort-Mann Foundation, Monira Foundation, and the Sharpe Walentas Foundation.

My practice is driven by a belief in the potential of painting to connect people, through shared sensory experiences and the temporary disruption of social and material boundaries. By using and misusing the fundamental elements of color, form, and surface, I choreograph experiences that collapse the distance between viewer and artwork, suggesting a way of seeing and being in the world that privileges sensation over interpretation, akin to the way one might experience music or poetry. I consider the painterly surface—porous and absorptive—to be something like an organ, alive to our moment and capable of responding to its environment.

-Anna Kunz

I transpose these gestures across varying registers, from small score/demo-like works on paper and linen, to traditionally sized canvases painted with tools I make, to immersive, scaled paintings made directly on the walls of exhibition spaces, sometimes paired with painted and dyed fabrics that function like nets to capture and manipulate light.

-Anna Kunz

I’m interested in how these oscillations in scale and orientation implicate the viewer in different ways, my bodily gestures becoming a mediator between space, light, and optical and somatic experience. I use my palette to facilitate a similarly relational experience of color, revealing the perceptual instability of colors and their contingency on light, time, distance, and perspective.

-Anna Kunz

Through my work, I aim to reimagine two-dimensional painting as a dynamic social space to be experienced with the body. The urgent sociopolitical issues of our time underpin my concerns as an artist: to make work that offers space for contemplation, togetherness, and joy, while also challenging viewers to consider their own embodied subjectivities.

-Anna Kunz