A body of work balancing spontaneity and precision
This week we welcome Audrey Anastasi, a visual artist working across a wide array of media including painting, drawing, printmaking and collage, and often blurring the boundaries between them. Her recent collage work was included in Epicenter NYC’s recent exhibition, “Cut Creators: Collage for Contemporary Times.”
Anastasi’s subjects include feminist and spiritual themes, forced migration, images of birds, animals and birch trees. Since 1990, most of her figurative works have been painted with her non-dominant left hand. Among her countless influences from the broad history of Western art are Fra Angelico, Masaccio, the Impressionists, Anselm Kiefer and Lucien Freud. Audrey admires the courage of Alice Neel and Helen Levitt for being true to their vision, and forging ahead, in an era when the work of women artists was often disregarded.
In 2005, Audrey and her husband, Joseph Anastasi founded Tabla Rasa Gallery in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Brooklyn Arts Council and Hook Arts Media. She is President Emeritus of Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. In 2026, she was awarded the Carol A. O’Neill Memorial Award for her painting, “Isaac Woodard, Man with No Eyes.” Anastasi has an extensive history of over 20 solo exhibitions and approximately 200 group shows. Her work is in numerous private and public collections.
Her original “ref-u-gee” series of 180 paintings on the theme of forced migration was shown in solo exhibitions at the Valentine Museum of Art (VMoA) and the Brooklyn College library gallery. A 440-page monograph with over 180 images and a foreword by Phyllis Braff was published in an edition, limited to 250 signed and certified copies.
“The collages were created first in the presence of a model, working quickly, in charcoal and pastel, and again, later, alone, furiously tearing and pasting images from magazines, various language newspapers, print publications, and previous drawings,” Anastasi said.
“In this way, both in theme and technique, I am working at the intersection of disciplined control and randomized instinct. Observational drawing coexists with selected patterns, colors, and images from media, assembled and pasted down like broad swaths of paint,”she continued.
