Spotlight Artist

Henry Gabriel Anker

MFA Annual
Artist profile photo
Featured in New American Paintings

Artist Statement

My paintings are abstract allegorical landscapes of interwoven visual and narrative symbols. These symbols do not function as citational didactics but as enigmatic narrative projections. With each painting pointing back to the ones that preceded it, I am in conversation with the past. I mine utopian theory for inquiries into alchemy, movement, gender, and color:

–Ernst Bloch’s pitcher with “alchemical eyes of a forest spirit”
–Ivan Chtcheglov’s Situationist house, its movements
corresponding to natural, celestial patterns
–Charles Fourier’s queer future of androgynous plants and
lovesick philosophers bathing under a six-moon sky
–Walter Benjamin’s dreamed rainbow of unseen colors

They vibrate and hum in an airy landscape made by a frenetic hand.

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