Anastasia Komar

New Collectors presents Nocturnal Formation, an exhibition of artist Anastasia Komar’s most recent work.

Nocturnal Formation features a series of work created during the 2020 lockdown in New York. As people were forced to spend increasingly long and intimate time with themselves, they began finding new ways to communicate the physical and ethereal experience of living in isolation. Her new work captures this body-experience of reacting to—and eventually growing within—catastrophe and of the yearning and absolute wanting born from a life of seclusion.

Drawing on Pointillist practices, the work explores ideas of fragmentation and the relationship between an individual and their environment, and how one expands and contracts in reaction to internal and external stimuli. Breaking away from her traditionally black and white charcoal pieces, the artist utilizes colorful acrylic paint to create an enveloping, dream-like environment.

New Collections showcases several of Komar’s acrylic paintings and a glass polymer sculpture, created during her recent residency at SVA. The paintings featured in this show explore the allegorical phantoms of our environment. They are a way of comprehending the ghosts of our present and past, of getting close to the specters which transcend linear time. Komar’s three-dimensional work, a pendulum of artificial bones slightly compressing a soft pillow, is an extension of this ephemeral. It too poses in an in-between state, unresolved, ambiguous, and changing. Each work is an instrument of sensuous communication.

Anastasia Komar (b. 1986, Kaliningrad, Russia) is an artist, architect, and designer based in New York City. Her work blends technical training and deconstructive philosophies to explore the metaphysical relationships between process and matter, object and space. Her work centers on the metaphysical, which extends infinitely within a finite frame, producing the uncanny effect of appearing monumental even at the smallest scale.