Anya Belyat-Giunta

MŰVÉSZI HITVALLÁS

The turbulent atmosphere of the dissolving Soviet Union forced her family into exile. She spent her teenage years moving around Austria, Italy, and finally, the United States. The one thing that accompanied Anya throughout this challenging journey was drawing, an activity that has always been essential for her. So much so that she decided to pursue an art education in Florence, Italy, then in the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the USA, and ultimately, in Toulouse, France. Anya participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions over Europe, Russia, Asia, and the United States. She currently lives and works in Lyon, France. 

In 2001, she received the Charles Oulmont Prize from the Foundation of France. Later, in 2015, she was shortlisted for the Partners Drawing Prize of the Saint Etienne Modern Art Museum in France. Her work is widely sought after and appears in both the Antwerp Museum of Fine Art Collection and the Thomas Koerfer Collection in Switzerland.

Her drawings resemble ambiguous constructions that fuse body and soul, strange architectures, and the landscapes of collective memory. They seem to be following a mysterious code system while adopting dream-like logic. In her artistic process, Anya juggles extremely detailed visual descriptions and areas of color gradients occupying the empty space. Her strange and ambiguous universe questions the enigma of existence that lies somewhere between catastrophe and renaissance, order and chaos, body and landscape, dark matter, and pink flesh.

Anya Belyat-Giunta's strange, eccentric faces and figures are disturbing embodiments of dream-like hallucinations, which reflect deep, often hidden memories, projections, imaginations, unsupportable experiences, and emotional crises. The narrative of Anya Belyat-Giunta’s drawings shows an anecdotic richness and contextualizes her imaginary in literary, poetic micro-cosmos. / Lorand Hegyi /