Anita Desoto

New Zealand artist Anita DeSoto lives in Waitati, Dunedin and has been exhibiting nationally and internationally for the last 15 years. She has a Master of Fine Arts and has been lecturing in Drawing and Painting at the Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic since 2004.
In recognition of her contribution to the New Zealand visual arts she was awarded an arts residency in the prestigious Leipzig International Art Program for three months in Leipzig, Germany (2010). In 2014, she was artist in residence at the New Pacific Studios in Vallejo, San Francisco, 2014.
DeSoto paints gesturally, using broad strokes that appear to blur or smear the images; sometimes her oil paint application is so thick that the strokes drip and distort surrounding forms and give her work a ghostly feel or one of motion or a fleeting moment.
Her recent work focuses on the tableau as a narrative device deployed in figurative painting to portray historical events and the re-interpretation of such events, thus opening windows on appropriation aimed at the invocation of memory and pathos around the intergenerational history of women once marginalized but now re-evalued. Connecting earlier paintings with contemporary works utilizing the tableau unlocks t...

MASTER of FINE ARTS, Otago Polytechnic School of Art, Dunedin, New Zealand.BACHELOR of FINE ARTS, Otago Polytechnic School of Art, Dunedin, New Zealand.Graduate Diploma in Teaching, Dunedin

SOLO EXHIBITIONS:
2016 Vintage, Orex Art , Auckland
2016 O Maria, Artists Room, Dunedin
2015 I Want More in a Nutshell, Artists Room, Dunedin
2014 Sweet Home Sick, Aratoi-Wairarapa Museum of Art and History, Wairarapa
2012 Coming Back, Milford Galleries, Dunedin
2010 Sign Post from God. Oedipus Rex Gallery, Auckland
2009 Cross My Heart, Milford Gallery, Dunedin
2007 Away, Away, Milford Gallery, Dunedin
2008 Pie in the Sky, Oedipus Rex Gallery, Auckland
2006 Votive & Lies, Oedipus Gallery, Auckland
2005 Limbus The Temple Gallery, Moray Place, Dunedin
2003 Desire Drapes Everything The Temple Gallery, Dunedin

GROUP EXHIBITIONS:
2016 Birthday show, Artists Room, Dunedin
2016 Hope & sons Art Awards, Dunedin
2016 Art Fair, Oamaru
2015 Xmas exhibition Artists Room, Dunedin
2015 Art & Design, Skinner Annex, Dunedin
2015 Birthday show, Artists Room, Dunedin
2014 Staff, Aigantighe Gallery, Timaru
2014 Staff, Forrester Gallery, Oamaru
2013 Small Works, Milford Gallery, Dunedin
2013 Religious Experience, Orex Art, Auckland
2012 Traces, Leipzig Art Fair, Leipzig, Germany
2012 Molly Morpeth Canady Art Award Exhibition
2012 Summer Show, Milford Gallery, Dunedin
2012 Art in Practice, University of Otago, Dunedin
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