Exhibition Review: Anna Ostoya’s “Motions”
A stretch of tranquil white walls engulfs, and leads you to Anna Ostoya’s exhibition, Motions, featured at Bortolami Gallery in Tribeca, New York City. Creating stark contrasts against innocent walls, Ostoya presents a series of humman-sized paintings and collages. Canvases displaying abstracted figures in movement rise from the contours of the human body. A mirage spawning from the use of many materials, which include oil paint, metallic leaf, newspapers and shopping bags, unveils the motion and action evoked of her work. Ostoya focuses on producing emotional pieces that push you to analyze and connect their complicated relations to themes of history and art.
Logging entries of her days leading up to her exhibit, Ostoya documents her battles and truces with her life and the art presented in Motions. In her entries the most as she explains the tedious process of completing her work. Expressing that it develops slowly, she describes the trance she was put in while working on paintings.
09/14/20 — Motions (Entries), Anna Ostoya
“Slap is developing slowly. The layering takes time and leads to muscle pain and migraines. The colors are so intense and I have to bend like an acrobat to paint. This puts me into a psychedelic state. Here comes my Sun and his face looks colorful and bright. I’d like to pick him up but my back and arms hurt too much. He is jumping around the puddles of color and I lean against the door, trying to calm my eyes by looking at a gray wall outside.”
Slap creates a juxtaposition with other artworks in the series. It stimulates your eyes in a violent sense that is galvanizing and psychedelic. Much of an advancement from (UN)MADE (After Frenhoferr) (2017), you can see both the resemblance and growth in her style that creates a magical depth by overlapping of energetic color.
Begin to be induced as Ostoya creates liquid poetry that inches you into euphoria. The range of deeper blues and lighter pinks attract your eyes in ways that are easier to feel, rather than say. Extasy almost completely freezes you as these colors interact with each other against a bare white wall.
Ostoya creates the illusion of action and inspires new meanings and thoughts with her fifth exhibition at Bortolami Gallery. Scoping emotions from severity to vulnerability with her painting and collage-work, Motions reaches boundaries of intellectual and emotional extension as tension flows through her art.
