DVAA Member since 2022
Anna Guarneri
Website:
About:
Anna Guarneri is a visual artist based in Philadelphia. She works in various media, including drawing, painting, and stained glass. She has a BA in cultural history from the University of Pennsylvania and studied art at Gage Academy of Art and California College of the Arts. She has exhibited work in Washington state, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
Artist Statement:
“My work is an exploration of suggestive forms and our visual, non-literal selves. I am interested in connecting the viewer with a world that feels familiar but unnamable, and in using crude marks and associations to tap into pre-verbal human experience. I pull from a range of sources to do this - ancient art, architecture, music and dance – and play with figures and structures that offer meaning but resist identification.
Much of my work also explores the devotional and decorative connotations of stained glass. In my series Shape Up, the medium elevates and objectifies forms from my drawings through illumination and upright display. In The Stacks, the color and qualities of the glass turn individual pieces into celebrations, memorials, or premonitions.
My series of 4x5 inch mixed media self-portraits builds on my interest in early human experience. These works draw inspiration from Upper Paleolithic “Venus” figurines, some of the earliest examples of figurative art. While the figurines were long thought to be fertility symbols or fetish objects, an alternative theory is that they were self-portraits made by women looking down at their own bodies. The series explores variations on the female nude with a playful, revisionist lens.”
Exhibitions at DVAA:
