Anna Glantz

Anna Glantz (b. 1989, Concord, MA) lives and works in Los Angeles.

In 1856, Flaubert famously wrote in Madame Bovary, “Human speech is like a cracked cauldron upon which we tap crude rhythms which make bears dance, while we long to make music that would move the stars.” Such a statement feels something like a literary analogue to the strange and unsettling world of Anna Glantz. Yet where the French writer melancholically rues the limits and hopes of language, Glantz seems more interested in depicting the dancing bears, or at least their pictorial equivalent. Improbable, absurd, droll, and at times, down right bathetic, Anna Glantz makes figurative paintings which push at, sometimes trip on and fall over the limits of representation. At once personal and art historical, scenarios are generated that deliberately touch upon the allegorical or the symbolic, without ever fully yielding to the temptation of such lingual structures. By the same token, the practice itself is characterized by a technical and modal variety, sometimes within the same work. But the craft that goes into each picture is undergirded by a quality of painting and intention that eschews anything like ambivalence. Everything in Glantz’ inimitable shape-shifting world feels as deliberate and unique as her frame of reference, which includes Italian renaissance frescoes, classical Indian manuscript painting, as well as the American folk art of Ammi Phillips and Zedekiah Belknap, among others.

Recent solo exhibitions include Lichens, The Approach, London, 2023; Cement Answers, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022; and Baby Grand, The Approach, London, 2020.

Recent group exhibitions include Trespass sweetly urged, Tanya Leighton, Berlin, 2024; A Minor Constellation, Chris Sharp Gallery, Los Angeles, 2022; The Stands-Ins: Figurative Painting from the Collection, Zabludowicz Collection, London, 2022; Therein / Thereof / Thereto, Standard (OSLO), Oslo, 2021; and A Love Letter to a Nightmare, Petzel Gallery, New York, 2020.