Anna Kunz ROSY
September 14, 2023 – October 27, 2023
Reception: Thursday, September 14, 5-7pm

What’s a bashful artist to do when confronted with showing her work in public? Sometimes the answer is a rosy blush of embarrassment. She might also have a favorite Aunt Rosy, a fellow creative maker. If she ultimately sees life through an optimistic lens, like those famous rose-colored glasses, it all adds up to our next exhibition by ANNA KUNZ… ROSY

ROSY is a new body of work featuring thirty small oil paintings and eight works on paper. Anna has also installed one of her beautiful diaphanous, curtained installations — layers of dyed and printed textiles hanging from the ceiling before the gallery’s front window. The conversation between the arrangement of small oils and the undulating curtain of color serves as a reminder that immersiveness, architectural intervention (“softening,” as she puts it), and shared experience are crucial themes for Kunz. She intends her installations to create a social space that encourages reflection and invites multiple points of view — “Compassionate Geometry.”

I met Anna nearly 30 years ago… Knowing her for this long is somewhat like reading an interesting book, a novel that you pick up and put down, but always return to… curious as to the heroine’s next adventure. Her’s have been many and varied, but I think the most remarkable thing is the overriding consistency of the work. The work matters. From then to now the work flows, meandering through style and media—canvas, installations, acrylic, ink, fabric, surf, dyes, paper, watercolor—making bold detours, but always returning to a centered core that is just… Her. Anna pushes boundaries. I think that devotion to a central belief, in her own thinking and doing, has been her North Star. She also has a bucket-full of grit… not a bad thing to possess these days. Accept fierce salvation where you can find it.

Anna Kunz lives and works in Chicago where she was born and raised. She holds a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Northwestern University. She has been honored by numerous arts institutions 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, NYC. Anna was just included in ART 50 2023, Chicago’s Artist’s Artists by New City Magazine.

Rosy is the fourth thematic gallery exhibition we have been lucky enough to host for Anna over the past 23 years. Her blockbuster, Anna Kunz: Paintings, launched the opening of our West Loop gallery in 2000. Yellow Pinto followed in 2017, with Blue Magnitude showing in 2020. Some things change… but the good stuff remains.

The gallery will be publishing a small book on ROSY during the run of the exhibition, look for that. Please find more information about Kunz’s work in an interview organized by the Brooklyn Rail and an essay by Nell Andrew. The artist is @annakunzchicago on Instagram and her website is www.AnnaKunz.net

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