Anna Conway (born 1973) is an American visual artist based in New York City and known for enigmatic oil paintings that depict uneasy, absurdist moments descending on isolated, ordinary individuals.Churner, Rachel
"Anna Conway,"
''Artforum'', February 2018. Retrieved March 18, 2020.Boucher, Brian. "Anna Conway at Guild and Greyshkul," ''Art in America'', September 2007.''The New Yorker''. "Art in Review", April 2, 2007. Retrieved March 18, 2020. She combines a style identified as precise and methodical with detailed observation,''Domus''

Domus, March 2016. Retrieved March 18, 2020. "an air of surrealist suspension," and a narrative sense that critics characterize as elusive, metaphysical and "imbued with cinematic suggestion."Paderni, Marinella. "Anna Conway," ''Flash Art'', April 2016. Conway has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at MoMA PS1, the American Academy of Arts and Letters,

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1994 in Kansas City, Missouri. With a $5 million annual budget and approximately 75,000 visitors each year, it is Missouri's first and largest contemporary museum. Founders The core of the museum's perm ...

, University Art Museum at Albany, Fralin Museum of Art, and Collezione Maramotti (Italy), among other venues.Eleey, Peter
"Greater New York,"
''Frieze'', May 2005, p. 114. Retrieved March 18, 2020.''Artforum''
"American Academy of Arts and Letters Announces 2008 Art Awards,"
''Artforum'', March 19, 2008. Retrieved March 25, 2020.Dunbar, Elizabeth et al (ed). ''Phantasmania'', Kansas City, MO: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007.Fiore, Fiorella. "Slow and Silent, Anna Conway," ''Il Giornale Dell'Arte'', March 2016, p. 35. She has been recognized with a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

(2014),''Artforum''
"2014 Guggenheim Fellows Announced,"
''Artforum'', April 10, 2014. Retrieved March 25, 2020.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
"Anna Conway,"
Fellows. Retrieved March 18, 2020. two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards (2011, 2005),Pollock-Krasner Foundation
"Anna Conway,"
Artists. Retrieved March 18, 2020. and the American Academy of Arts and Letters William L. Metcalf Award (2008).''Art Review''. "100 Future Greats 2005," December/January 2006.

Early life and career

Conway was born in

Durango, Colorado Durango is a home rule municipality that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of La Plata County, Colorado, United States. The city population was 19,071 at the 2020 United States Census. Durango is the home of Fort Lewis Coll ...

in 1973 and grew up in

Foxborough, Massachusetts Foxborough is a town in Norfolk County, Massachusetts, United States, about southwest of Boston, northeast of Providence, Rhode Island and about northwest of Cape Cod. Foxborough is part of the Greater Boston area. The population was 18,618 at ...

. She studied art in New York City, earning a BFA from

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

(1997) and an MFA from Columbia University (2002). After graduating, she rented a studio in Brooklyn and gained early recognition for shows in New York at Artemis Greenberg Van Doren and Guild and Greyshkul in 2004, and at MoMA PS1 and

Phillips Phillips may refer to: Businesses Energy * Chevron Phillips Chemical, American petrochemical firm jointly owned by Chevron Corporation and Phillips 66. * ConocoPhillips, American energy company * Phillips 66, American energy company * Phil ...

de Pury & Company in 2005.Ribas, Joao. "She’s Come Undone," ''Time Out'' New York, July 1, 2004.Comita, Jenny. "Higher Learning," ''W'', March 2005.''Harper's Bazaar'' (Japan)."10 Artists: PS1," July 2005. Retrieved March 18, 2020.''Beaux Arts''. "P.S. 1 Review," July 2005. In subsequent years, she has had solo exhibitions at Fergus McCaffrey, American Contemporary and Guild & Greyshkul (all New York City) and Collezione Maramotti.Sutton, Kate
"Critics Pick: Anna Conway,"
''Artforum'', December 2017. Retrieved March 18, 2020.''The New Yorker''
"Anna Conway,"
April 22, 2013. Retrieved March 18, 2020.Carriero, Marcello. "Anna Conway, Contradictions Concealed in the Detail," ''Arte E Critica'', March 2016.Sacchi, Annachiara. "The Worlds of Anna Conway: Portrait of Time," ''La Lettura'', March 2016. In addition to her painting practice, Conway has taught at Cooper Union, Columbia University,

Parsons School of Design Parsons School of Design, known colloquially as Parsons, is a private art and design college located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Founded in 1896 after a group of progressive artists broke away from established Manhatt ...

, and

Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, New York. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls about 15,000 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students on a 35-acre campus. Being New York City's first publ ...

.Cooper Union
''The School of Art Annual Report (2013-2014)''
2014. Retrieved March 18, 2020.Hoffman, Claire

''The New York Times'', May 24, 2004. Sect. B, p. 3. Retrieved March 18, 2020. She lives and works in New York City.Baldwin, Rosecrans. "Anna Conway, Somebody Call Someone," ''The Morning News'', April 24, 2013.

Work and reception

Conway's art has been featured in '' Artforum'',Fry, Naomi
"Anna Conway,"
�''Artforum'', March, 2007. Retrieved March 18, 2020. ''

Art in America ''Art in America'' is an illustrated monthly, international magazine concentrating on the contemporary art world in the United States, including profiles of artists and genres, updates about art movements, show reviews and event schedules. It i ...

'', '' Flash Art'', '' Frieze'', '' The New York Times'',Smith, Roberta. "A Gallery Goes Out in a Burst of Energy," ''The New York Times'', February 6, 2009. Retrieved March 18, 2020. ''

Hyperallergic ''Hyperallergic'' is an online arts magazine, based in Brooklyn, New York. Founded by the art critic Hrag Vartanian and his husband Veken Gueyikian in October 2009, the site describes itself as a "forum for serious, playful, and radical thinking ...

'',Rodney, Seph
"Grim Vistas of Present and Future Dystopias,"
''Hyperallergic'', December, 2017. Retrieved March 18, 2020. and ''New American Paintings'',Zevitas, Steven (ed). "Anna Conway," ''New American Paintings'', Issue #74, 2008 Retrieved March 18, 2020. among many publications.Goodrich, John. "Art in Brief," ''The New York Sun'', July 5, 2007.Zevitas, Steven
"Ten Must See Painting Shows,"
''Huffington Post'', July 2012. Retrieved March 18, 2020. In a 2007 review, ''The New Yorker'' compared her work to the "fantastic, alienating styles of Magritte, Gregory Crewdson and

Jeff Wall Jeffrey Wall, Order of Canada, OC, Royal Society of Canada, RSA (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit Cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Early in his career, he helped define the Van ...

, with strange tableaux suggesting both religious miracles translated into the everyday and "the apocalypse rendered in miniature," rather than cinemaplex, scale. These paintings often present workaday men reduced to tiny figures in quietly mysterious, absurd scenes suggesting futility, inscrutable inner states and back stories, and a sense of suburban normalcy gone wrong.Heartney, Eleanor. "Return to the Real?" ''Art in America'', 2006, p. 85–9.Ho, Christopher. "In View: Greater New York 2005," ''Modern Painters'', May 2005. Critics such as ''Hyperallergics Seph Rodney suggest that Conway's work in the later 2010s carries a more pervasive, foreboding quiet, reflecting both a

dystopia A dystopia (from Ancient Greek δυσ- "bad, hard" and τόπος "place"; alternatively cacotopiaCacotopia (from κακός ''kakos'' "bad") was the term used by Jeremy Bentham in his 1818 Plan of Parliamentary Reform (Works, vol. 3, p. 493). ...

n fear and desire for the scarcity of humanity, concerns about sustainability and social inequality, and the heightened tension of a more ominous, paranoid era. ''Artforum'' critic Kate Sutton writes that Conway's "pristine execution echoes the would-be flawlessness of her settings," which she subtly intrudes upon with seemingly accidental figures and evocations of the past suggesting loss amid sleek, contemporary modernism (e.g., ''Haniwa'', 2017). Rachel Churner describes these paintings as the visual equivalents of spy novels "marked by the abundance and clarity of their details" and the thrill of deciphering what is significant and what is merely mundane.

References

External links

Anna Conway official website

Anna Conway
Guggenheim Fellow page
Anna Conway
artist page, Fergus McCaffrey Gallery
Interview with Anna Conway
{{DEFAULTSORT:Conway, Anna American women painters 21st-century American painters Painters from New York City Cooper Union alumni Columbia University alumni People from Foxborough, Massachusetts 1973 births Living people 20th-century American women artists People from Durango, Colorado Painters from Massachusetts Painters from Colorado Cooper Union faculty Columbia University faculty Parsons School of Design faculty Brooklyn College faculty 21st-century American women artists