OVERVIEW

Ana Navas

Liste Year

Year of Birth

Country of Birth

Presented by

2021

1984

Peru

Crisis

Ana navas retrato fondo claro1

Concepts such as transformation, assimilation and appropriation play an important role in the work of venezuelan artist Ana Navas. Her work arises from an ever-recurring interest in the relations between design, art, and ‘low-brow’ disciplines such as decorative crafts.

Anavas 2019 at crisis
ANA ANVAS at strs

The series of ‘Tara’ works involves an investigation into archetypical painting and the required properties for such a work to be considered a painting. The compositions are based on household interpretations of iconic gestures from art history.

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Ana navas brancusi installation view

Etui is composed by a copy of the sculpture Bird in Space by Constantin Brancusi acquired from an online decoration shop and a textile. The textile works as a carpet, a composition or a plinth, but it can also be used to transport the reproduction. When the sculpture lies horizontally, all the shapes that formed the composition become functional elements.

Etui enrollado
Brancusita fondo blanco

As a Latin-American artist, rather than isolating her work to a certain demographic, it should be understood as responding to broader questions about the construction and performativity of identity. The quality of Navas’s works resides in the humorous and inventive ways in which she shows that what we are – or better, what we are required to be – is constructed and communicated through simple and seemingly inofensive objects and behaviors.

Liste Year

Year of Birth

Country of Birth

Presented by

2020

1984

Peru

Crisis

Rarely true, Kunstruimte De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam, 2019
Rarely true, Kunstruimte De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam, 2019

These elements are placed on two-dimensional collage-like surfaces, where the artist experiments with textiles, patterns, domestic objects and other significant references for her research.

As a result of this exercise emerges a series of vessels with phrases related to female empowerment in the workplace.

Anavas donation vase 2019 3
Anavas donation vase 2019 2
Anavas, Crisis, 2019
El barro, la culebra y sus principios, Crisis, 2019
Anavas 2019 crisis installationview2
Installation views at Crisis, 2019

The series of ‘Tara’ works involves an investigation into archetypical painting and the required properties for such a work to be considered a painting. The compositions were constructed from image fragments that show up on Google Images when you search for terms such as ‘contemporary painting’, ‘abstract painting’, or even just ‘painting’. They are based on household interpretations of iconic gestures from art history.

Ana Navas sopor 2014
Ana Navas, Sopor, 2014, video 8:20 min

Ana Navas was born in Quito, Ecuador in 1984 and grew up in Venezuela. From 2004 to 2010 she studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Karlsruhe, where she continued as a Meisterschülerin (MA) with Franz Ackermann from 2010 to 2011. Between 2012 and 2014 she was a resident at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. This was followed by residencies in France, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and The Netherlands. Among the locations where her work has been shown in solo presentations are Kunstruimte of De Nederlandsche Bank in Amsterdam (2019, NL); Schunck, Heerlen (2019, NL); de Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden ...