Anita Fricek is an Austrian artist based in Vienna. She studied at Studio Hamilton in Florence, at CUNY Queens College, New York, and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Western Sydney, Australia, a recipient of the Austrian State Stipend for Fine Arts, and had residencies in London and Sydney. She has exhibited widely over the last 25 years in both solo and group exhibitions, including Turner Contemporary, Margate; Künstlerhaus, Vienna; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Frankfurter Kunstverein; Sala Rekalde, Bilbao; Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; Artspace, Sydney; and CAC, Vilnius. For 15 years she has developed an extensive painting project investigating pedagogical models, and is currently working on the theme of community gardens.
Read MoreHer drawings and paintings are taken from video footage Anita made of gardeners, of the groundsman, as well as of a community garden in Vienna. Some older paintings are based on the 70s book by the Austrian gardener and educator Anton Eipeldauer explaining how children and their parents can grow flowers together.
Anita Fricek finds intense beauty in the way people work and carry out ordinary tasks. For her, recording the visible world with her pens and brushes is a form of touching, of reaching out, and of creating something new. In this way she tries to communicate a strong, affirmative answer to life through her work, an answer found in friendship and equality. Anita's work is therefore also a political quest, one that begins from a sense of social responsibility.
