Henri's Girl Artwork

Anit is a Slovak artist and designer based in Barcelona, working under her artistic label by/Anit. Her artworks are made of construction materials, mostly steel nails, attached to canvas and painted with acrylic colours. This technique is her own visual form of expression based on her experiment with different media and materials shaped into visually distinctive 3D steel paintings. Her artworks translate a classical painting to painted steel object, deconstructing the visual foundation of the source of inspiration into a mosaic which uses steel nail-head as a point. Her works have been part of several international exhibitions in Prague, Bangkok, Houston, Amsterdam and in a various Slovak galleries. Anit grew up on a construction site. She spent a lot of time discovering construction materials and playing with them. Her fascination with metals comes from her haptic preference and rule breaking need. In her late teens she was diagnosed with an allergy to certain metal alloys and was advised to avoid the touch with metals as much as possible. Since steel is an alloy which can contain different percentages of elements inducing skin allergy, she was supposed to avoid working with it. Her attachment to it however isn't based on stubborn insistence. Iron, the major elemental component of steel, is one of the most plentiful elements in the earth’s crust and it is also a very important mineral in a human body. Anit struggled with iron deficiency for over a decade, and by working with metal alloy based on iron she psychologically reintroduced this element to her body through touch, mentally dissolving every negative association with her condition. Steel for Anit represents strength. Prefabricate in form of a nail which she decided to work with, gives her the power to debilitate this primary quality of steel. She creates neat, soft-looking reliefs on canvas made of hundreds to thousands of steel nails which are shaped into rather fragile compositions. Apart from her affinity to metals, the use of steel nails with big flat rounded heads is also associated with her interest in geometric shapes. A point created by the nail head is a geometric shape itself, even though imperfect. This imperfection however gives life, transformation and uniqueness to every artwork. When she started to experiment with the technique she chose difficult, conceptual recreation of old master portraits with a contemporary message hidden in the faces.