The Galbut Institute is pleased to present She, an exhibition of four recent large-scale paintings by the artist Anna Vickers. Painted between 2020 and 2025, these works continue Vickers’s long-standing exploration of the female nude subject, engaging both its art-historical legacy and the layers of critique that have since reframed it. The yellow hues that dominated Vickers’s series introduce these works in the painting . They transition from a symbol of waste into the soft yellow haze of early sunrise — illuminating spaces of blue, oceanic atmosphere throughout all four works.
Borrowing its title from Charles Aznavour’s 1974 chanson of the same name, slips into : a sonic and visual slippage that mirrors the paintings themselves, where the figures dissolve into this new oceanic state.
Like Aznavour’s vocal lines unfurling upward as though lifted off the ground, Vickers’s storm-swept figures ascend through breaching, tempestuous gestures — splashes and spirals that evoke cresting waves, hurricanes, and tornadic updrafts. As the figures rise, they diffuse into the atmosphere, their bodies evaporating into coiling currents. By the time they reach the cosmos, they are fully atomized — weightless shimmers within a twinkling starfield, echoing the exalted shimmer of the word as sung by Aznavour. Just as Aznavour imbues that word with reverence through melodic lift, Vickers renders her figures sublime — in their literal passage from solid to vapor, and in their exaltation.
Action emerges as a primary theme across these new works. It’s felt in the depiction of elemental forces, the drama of sweeping gestures, and in the layers of visible mark-making that accumulate to form each painting’s atmosphere. Action doesn’t dismantle the figure; rather, it subsumes it until figure and force become indistinguishable, and the sole worldly quality of the figure that remains is action.
Anna Vickers is originally from London and now based in Paris. She has exhibited her work internationally, with recent solo shows at the Galbut Institute in Miami, Olivia Edwards Gallery in New York and Paris, and Tile Blush Gallery in Miami. Her paintings have also been shown in group exhibitions at Triangle Space (Chelsea College of Arts, London), Camberwell Space (London), and the Pavillon Davioud at the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. She holds a PhD from University of the Arts London and a BA from the Slade School of Fine Art, where her 2002 degree show was featured on the front page of The Independent, one of the UK’s leading national newspapers. In 2017, she coauthored the book Sorry I’m A Lady with artist Jason Galbut, with a second edition published in 2022.
