@annagardinerart
Anna Gardiner (born 1966, London) paints a narrative/non-narrative world of banality using the quotidian objects of our collective relationship with the landscape. Not for Gardiner the modern dystopia, nor the pastoral rolling hills – these places are firmly ‘normcore’.
Everyone makes their impact felt on their surroundings, imprinting themselves and their values, tastes and loves on their particular hearth land. The quiet ambition, folly, humour, secrets, generosity and joy of countless anonymous lives are represented by caravans, pollarded trees, double chimneys, clean-swept driveways and wonky telly aerials.
The rude physicality of the paint – textured, impasto, intensely coloured – on well-crafted surfaces, transforms the everyday into the sublime.
As well as landscape, in the broadest sense, these works are about home in all its guises: as a place, a time, and as a sensory trigger. Though the places may feel very specific, and perhaps even familiar, none really are. They are archetypes, constructs of a nation’s memory.
Gardiner received a Masters in Fine Art at the Royal Academy Schools, London, in 1994, and subsequently lived for some seven years in New York City, before returning to live and work again in London. As well as regular solo shows in both cities, her work has been acquired for many corporate and private collections. The work has won The NatWest Prize for Art, the National Open Art Towry Award and the Benton Prize at the Discerning Eye Exhibition, and has been written about by – among others – Andrew Graham Dixon.