Ana Navas
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2021
1984
Peru
Crisis
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.
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.
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.
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
Concepts such as transformation, assimilation and appropriation play an important role in the work of artist Ana Navas (1984, Quito, Ecuador). Her work arises from an ever-recurring interest in the relations between design, art, and ‘low-brow’ disciplines such as decorative crafts. She examines the perception of art outside the context of art, as well as the notions of ‘original’ and ‘copy’.
‘Power dressing’ describes an 80’s fashion trend that focused in supporting the executive woman aiming to ‘break through the glass ceiling’. Various best seller books of the time offered advice on how to dress appropriately to blend in companies’ sectors dominated by the opposite gender. Ana reinterprets this advice in a series of assemblages, each containing a central element: either a key component from these fashion consultancies or a fictional accessory – nonexistent in the market but aligned with this trend’s negotiation-.
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.
The artist's work methodology seems to be inspired by the restless mind of a teenager: objects of heterogeneous backgrounds and functions are carefully analyzed in an effort to build a genealogy, but at the same time, to enhance the points of contagion and contamination of the styles and political discourses that traverse them.
Navas turns her gaze to the domestic sphere, discussing the idea that the objects with which we cohabit are mere tools that facilitate us the day to day, to reveal how they are physically and ideologically organizing our experience —personal and social— in a differentiated way according to our gender.
As a result of this exercise emerges a series of vessels with phrases related to female empowerment in the workplace.
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 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 ...