YveYANG Gallery is pleased to present Imitation of Life, a solo exhibition of London-based artist Anastazie Anderson, which also inaugurates her representation by the gallery. Titled after Douglas Sirk’s landmark 1959 film, the exhibition brings together 11 newly executed works—including three diptychs and three triptychs—and explores melodrama through the medium of paint. This marks Anderson’s debut solo exhibition and her first time showing in the US. The exhibition will open on Saturday, March 16th, and be on view through April 27th, 2024.
The exhibition is divided into two sections, daytime and nighttime, mirroring the cycle of domestic life while providing a clear visual schema for visitors to experience as they walk through the gallery. The use of diptychs and triptychs creates a snapshot effect by pairing eccentric compositions while also establishing a common cast of characters. Beyond these arrangements, recurring motifs—the artist's family house, a distant water tower, and a Siamese cat with blue eyes—foster a sense of nostalgia. These allusions evoke a private language and a shared narrative, as if recalling one's own childhood while leafing through someone else's photo album.
Drawing inspiration from home photography, social media imagery, cinematic iconography as well as the monographs of modernist masters, Anderson paints larger-than-life works that immerse the viewer in expansive realms, recreating childhood and personal history through photographs, art history, and memory—an artistic approach she refers to as “mediated fantasies.”
Beyond the evident propensity for size, Anderson's works manifest an obsession with light that diverges from conventional illumination. Some elements fade into white expanses; others vanish into shadow. This juxtaposition serves a dual purpose: symbolizing emotional extremes and a simplified moral universe, while also creating a barrier between the viewer and the artwork. It serves as a reminder that the scenes are not perceived firsthand but through emotional and optical lenses—providing insight into a perspective rather than reality itself.
Imitation of Life resonates with the paradoxes inherent in melodrama, blending sensationalism with formalism, domesticity with grand emotion, affectation with sincerity. Melodrama then could be viewed as uniquely suited to the contradictions of the contemporary psyche as well as to Anderson’s artistic expression.
