The Galbut Institute is pleased to present Ces Petits Riens, an exhibition of intimate, small-scaled paintings by the artist Anna Vickers. In his song Ces Petits Riens, Serge Gainsbourg vocalizes a meter of riens, or nothings, into poetic song. Similarly, Vickers gives visual shape to a series of riens by transforming them into virtuosic verses of paint. Embodied by the female nude, these Fragonard-scaled riens lithely emerge from a state of aestivation into blue lagoons and natural ponds. Hazy-looking water and shadowy voids evoke stirred-up sediment from exited burrows. Relaxed and tadpole-like, the larval figures casually swim about in bubbling water defined by tiny fan-brushed waves painted like the leaves of Watteau’s trees. A subtle pearlescence permeates the ponds like the subtle pearlescence of Daubigny’s skies. In Blues 5, a trio of figures alludes to The Three Graces while resembling bacteria in a petri dish. Glowing like luminous jellyfish or kryptonite, an atmospheric texture resembling fungus shrouds the Graces like the fog in Monet’s views of the river Thames. Built up from dense layers of paint, the result is a surface as crusty as a Jean Fautrier or early Frank Auerbach painting. In Blues 9, a figure posed like the Borghese Hermaphrodite on Bernini’s sumptuous mattress appears as if pinned to a dissection tray. More rigid and static than the Roman sculpture, it hearkens to the mathematical precision of William Coldstream and Euan Uglow.
The twelve works in the exhibition are part of Vickers’ Blues series. From spaces visually turned down in temperature to the coolness of Ingres’ boudoir in La Grande Odalisque, figures appear to have emerged from a cryogenic state. Themes of reawakening, metamorphosis and emergence abound, but with no sense of urgency. Casually reconstituting themselves from the devolved status of a microbe, Vickers’ liminal figures glide and recline, enjoying their repose. Originally from London, Anna Vickers is a Paris based artist. Recent exhibitions of her paintings include Blues at Olivia Edwards Gallery in New York and Paris, The Discarded Body at Tile Blush Gallery in Miami and Sorry I’m a Lady at the Pavillon Davioud, Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Tile Blush Gallery, Triangle Space (Chelsea College of Arts) and Camberwell Space. She recieved her PhD from University of the Arts London in 2022 and her Bachelor of Arts from the Slade School of Fine Art, where her 2002 degree show was featured on the front page of the Independent Newspaper. In 2017 she coauthored the book ‘Sorry I’m A Lady’ with artist Jason Galbut, with a second edition published in 2022.
