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Anna Gahlin Art

Painter/Artist

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  • About
  • Images
  • Conceptual work
  • On viewing colour

About

Influences

Some of the many artists who continue to influence me are:

  • Yves Klein
  • Brice Marden
  • Spencer Finch
  • Roni Horn
  • Rebecca Salter

CV

BA(Hons) 2009 and MFA (2010) Bath Spa University

Exhibitions

A selection of exhibitions since 2011.

Untitled 1
2018
The Pavillion of Painting
Fringe Arts, Bath
Foundlings boxes, FAB 2019
2017
Foundlings
Fringe Arts, Bath
De-Icers
Artist painting 4
2016
Accordingly…Art+Text
44AD, Bath
For St. Helen, paint/ink on vellum
2015
North
The Glassworks, St. Helen’s, Lancs
PV Colour Matters, Colour Matters 3
2015
Colour Matters solo exhibition private view
44AD, Bath

Colour Matters show - 2 walls, 44AD

2015
2 walls Colour Matters
44AD, Bath
Not Wanted on Voyage, acrylic paint/coloured pencils on paper
2015
Isolation
44AD, Bath
De-Icers
It Was Amazing, Dancing at the Crossroads triptych
2014
It was Amazing
44AD, Bath
Morpheus Coats, Freuds House Exhibition
2014
Freud’s House
Peggy Jay Gallery, Hampstead
Members of StudioXYZ
Winter Trio, Deck The Walls 44AD
2013
Deck The Walls
44AD, Bath
But for Squanto, double triptych
2012
Migration
American Museum in Britain, Bath
Members of StudioXYZ

Anna's studio corner, 2019

Art studio

I live and work in Bath. If you would like to arrange a studio visit to see my work in reality rather than virtually, please contact me at art@annagahlin.co.uk to arrange an appointment.

Current work

To see up-to-date work please follow me on Instagram @gahlinanna.

Anna Gahlin working in studio

A few words from Dr. Michele Whiting

Day is blue
Silence is green
Life is yellow
Light traces
Lines, and never ends,
And I trail behind
transpierced by indifference and playfulness!


Y. Klein, source of his artist quotes on art, his Blue, painting, & the Void: poetical lines from “Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings”, ed. J & J, the Tate Gallery, London 1974, p. 21. And incorporating words by Anna Gahlin (2015).


The image of their absence, life condensed into small intense colour studies, memories, feeling, fleeting moments and solid recollections, Gahlin’s work restores our faith in colour as an intimate experience. Here at 44AD the works are framed by the white space of the gallery walls, increasing the sense that we meet the surface of the painting as if we are slowing down time to watch a flower bloom in the in-between stages of it’s awakening. Colour. Each work modestly creates a spatial field around it, reaching out to us (the viewer) where small lines or passages of pigment become vectors for imagination.

Read the titles; they tell us about images and scenes, sensitivities to environments and events that pervade Anna’s mind and hand. There is a sense that she is reacting to a felt presence; her physicality within place, her place in relation to an event or thing. Maybe the process of making the work allows her (and us) to dwell in experiential colour, but it is soundly informed by what she has produced before, following a linear, thoughtful thread throughout the works which she herself recognises

I think what is influencing me more are the colours themselves and the progression of work I have made – each piece I make is influenced by what has come before it, and the surface I am painting on, which has generated the feeling that I am on a circular trajectory returning to the same starting point over and over again.

So, taking all these things into account, Anna Gahlin surpasses mere visual representation through making colour happen, ‘as if there were such a thing as haptic vision, we possess perceptual sensors that involve not only the gaze but indeed our whole being1‘. Each small work an intense event in itself, 1 time bled into each and every surface. In this context, her techniques though learnt and skilled become secondary, instead their perfection lays in the process of distilling life through colour, each one autonomously stating ‘this is what I am’. However, looking across the whole body of works, even though each lives independently, we record no dissonance but rhythm, balance and accord, apprehending the old adage, unity in plurality. The works’ corpus focuses attention on what ultimately may be truly essential to the human psyche. Colour.

It would be easy to align Gahlin’s work to past histories, there are clear pre-cursors and inspirations, but this would (I think) lazily manage to tether or even totally eradicate the authentic joy and clarity of her playfulness, as such there is intuitive intelligence within these works born from life’s experiences; standing in front of the works the viewer will quietly find her/his own colour ‘memory’ staring back, confronting their own personal, internal, layered histories. Anna Gahlin, doesn’t offer us a poetic or lyrical interpretation of something, but an inexorable rhythm, a reflective light, returning us to the centre of ones own self, making us immediately aware of our own condition.

Dr. Michele Whiting, August 2015

1 First published in Kunstler, Kritiisches Lexikon der Gegenwartkunst, No 53, 2001.

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