Influences
Some of the many artists who continue to influence me are:
CV
BA(Hons) 2009 and MFA (2010) Bath Spa University
Exhibitions
A selection of exhibitions since 2011.
De-Icers
De-Icers
Members of StudioXYZ
Members of StudioXYZ
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.
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.
1 First published in Kunstler, Kritiisches Lexikon der Gegenwartkunst, No 53, 2001.