Anoushka Akel is an artist who lives and works in Tāmaki Makaurau. She received her MFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts in 2010. Akel works across the mediums of painting and printmaking engaging with various fields including: embodied knowledge, cognitive psychology, and aesthetics and philosophies of care. Her work considers pressure and plasticity in relation to the body, behaviour, and the art object.
Akel’s work has been included in Walls to Live Beside, Rooms to Own, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2023; Painting: A Transitive Space, 2016, St. Paul Street Gallery 3, Auckland and Necessary Distraction: A painting show, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2015. Recent exhibitions include: Michael Lett at the Aotearoa Art Fair, 2023; Wet Contact, 2022, Michael Lett, Auckland; the body and its outside, 2021, Michael Lett; (Red Legs) Hot Head, 2020, Goya Curtain, Tokyo; Learners, 2019, Hopkinson Mossman, Wellington; Biographies of Transition: Too Busy to Think, 2017 Artspace, Auckland, NZ; Chain of Mountains, 2016, TCB, Melbourne; Back, Front, Brain, 2016, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington and Hop Scotch, 2012, Artspace, Auckland.
In 2024 Akel will take up a residency at Parehuia McCahon House. In 2018 she was the recipient of the C Art Trust Award in 2018 and in 2013 she was artist in residence at Künstlerhäuser Worpswede, Bremen, Germany.
Courtesy Lett Thomas


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