Anne Siems
In Essence, Anne Siems shifts the focus of her paintings to the face and the surrounding color field. Well known for her paintings of elaborate and ephemeral dresses, plants, fruits, people and animals, her latest work minimizes the figure and explores pattern and color with an emphasis on brushstroke and mark making. Personal experience and expression are revealed through abstract means in multiple layers of form and light. About this work, she says, “I am looking…to find the point in which we feel a certain ache—the ache caused by the knowledge that life is full of light and dark, sacred and profane, beauty and ugliness, life and death.”
Anne Siems was born in Germany and received her MFA in 1991 from Hochschule der Kunste in Berlin. Her work shows a fascination with nature and the mystery of human experience. Figures are delicately rendered and embraced by flora and fauna, yet placed in ambiguous settings of time and space. Siems has exhibited in the United States since the mid-1980s, at galleries in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Her work is included in the collections of the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, the Boise Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, Microsoft, University Hospital in Seattle and University of Washington, among others.