Anna Camner

Anna Camner's distinctive painterly oeuvre exists at the gentle intersection between figuration and abstraction. Underlying throughout the oeuvre is a desire to free oneself, to surrender control, to allow the subconscious priority in decision-making. Camner’s creative process is guided by a lengthy mental exercise, from which a slow-germinating idea of the resulting image arises. Only then, the painting process can be allowed to begin, and to further build on her intentional, but initially unattainable motivation.

A general surrealist feeling carries throughout the oeuvre. Often abstract, yet strangely familiar, the narratives are pushed to the surface from the deep black depths; desire translated into equivocal shapes in a calm renaissance manner.

Each work is somewhat used as a means of communication: completely honest and unfiltered. Camner purposely avoids verbal descriptions and definitions of her art. However, a focal theme carries throughout: the on-going hybridization between nature and synthetics, with motifs balancing on the wandering border between what is natural or artificial. Suggestive motifs are interlaced with human, sexual and mental references, creating a unique visual vocabulary, filled with poisons and lust.

Camner is a consummate example of an artist who cannot be restricted according to contemporary matrixes. The natural scientific aesthetic used, combined with the mastery of her one medium of choice (oil on acrylic sheet), results in poetic, fragmentary perspectives of the psyche, whose presence is almost audible.

Anna Camner (b. 1977) lives and works in Stockholm and has exhibited in Sweden and internationally since graduating from the Royal Institute of Art in 2003. Her work has previously been exhibited in solo shows in Stockholm, London and New York, and featured in The International Biennial of Contemporary Art (BIACI) in Cartagena, Colombia in 2014, Mumbai, India in 2019 and at the Armory Show, NY, USA, in 2020. In conjunction with being awarded the prestigious annual Beckers Art Award in 2017, her work was exhibited at Färgfabriken, Stockholm, Sweden.