Australian contemporary artist Anastasia Klose, through drawing, writing, video and live unscripted performance, provides a candid, satirical and often humorous take on her life, the art world, and issues of gender bias. Her work is often confronting due to the very personal nature of its subject matter; the artist purposely puts herself in humiliating situations in her work, blurring the line between art, artist and audience.
Read MoreBorn in 1978, Klose completed a BA in Philosophy and English at the University of Melbourne in 1998, before studying up to a BFA Honours at the Victorian College of Arts (VCA) between 2004 and 2005. One of her first video works, In the Toilets with Ben (2005), features Klose having intercourse with a fellow VAC student. This was followed by a film entitled Mum and I watch in the toilets with Ben (2005) in which the artist and her mother watch the intimate film on the couch together. Klose's mother, the performance artist and academic Elizabeth Presa, has collaborated with her on several works over the years.
In Klose's performance work Film for My Nanna (2007), she walks the streets of Melbourne donning an old wedding dress and a cardboard sign with the words 'Nanna, I am still alone'. The film received attention from the art world and resulted in the artist receiving the Prometheus Visual Arts Award in 2007. The artist revived the bride searching for a groom concept in I'm Still Searching, which was shown at the 2011 Venice Biennale. At Art Basel, Hong Kong in 2014 Klose set up the One Stop Knock Off Shop, selling mock knock-off t shirts with subversions of well-known art 'brands' such as Ai Way Way, Louise Boudoir and Art Blasé. With a more feminist objective in 2016 Klose attended the international Melbourne art fair, Spring 1883 (2016), dressed like a beauty queen with a sash declaring herself as 'Miss Spring 1883'. In this assumed role of beauty queen of the art fair she handed out statistics highlighting the overrepresentation of male artists at the fair and in the art world. Other recent work has focused on pets: her 2014 solo exhibition I Can't Stop Living (Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne) included drawings of pets, while in 2015, the artist created a temporary off-lead dog park outside the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art named Farnsworth's Republic in 2015.
Klose's work can be found in the public collections of the University of Queensland. The Prometheus Foundation and numerous private Australian collections.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2019
