ANITA DeSOTO

Pie in the Sky

1 - 19 April

Pie in the sky is exhibited at a time which recently saw the publication of Umberto Eco’s edited book On Ugliness, following his earlier On Beauty. It seems apt to mention these two texts in relation to DeSoto’s work, as the conjunction of beauty and ugliness is one aspect which makes her paintings performative of the neo-romanticism which they seem aligned to.   

Eco’s compendiums show us many examples of bodily beauty as based on harmony, elegance, appropriate proportions, smoothness and idealised limbs – the kind of beauty her audience has come to expect of DeSoto’s seductive bodies in poses often implicitly sexual. Even her infants recall Baroque putti or Eros with his arrow or the pre-pubescent nudity of the urinating Belgian Manneken Pis.  

- extract from catalogue

To read a review a review from the NZ Herald please click here.  

Anita DeSoto: Beauty and Ugliness 

(extract from catalogue)

Neo-romantic[i] painting in its present guises draws on the tradition of interspersing the ideal and the fearful, youthful beauty and heroic death, the beautiful and the sublime, the soothing and the unsettling – often through the use of juxtaposed fragments. DeSoto presents her models as if through eyes which desire their beautiful bodies and the cruel ecstasies they may harbour or inflict. The paintings remind one of a fragment written by an earlier romantic: Alfred Tennyson’s lines[ii] in a poem for Eleänor:

I would I were
So tranced, so rapt in ecstasies
To stand apart, and to adore,
Gazing on thee for evermore.

 Leoni Schmidt
Dunedin, 2008

This page represents a selection of the work in the exhibition, for more information please contact us