Anita DeSoto is a Recognised Aotearoa/New Zealand Artist
With 20 years of experience exhibiting her paintings nationally and internationally, the New Zealand artist Anita DeSoto holds a Master of Fine Arts and has been teaching Drawing and Painting at the Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic since 2004.
Anita has also been awarded several arts residencies, including one at the Leipzig International Art Program in Germany (2010), Aratoi Fellow in 2012, and an artist-in-residence at the New Pacific Studios in Vallejo, San Francisco in 2014. and the William Hodges Fellowship 2018.
Her paintings are in the collections of Southland Art Foundation, Pah House, Auckland and Anderson Park Public Gallery Collection, Invercargill.
Artist's Statement
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
George Orwell
I travel through history in my figurative oil paintings, reinterpreting narrative and empowering my figures through acts of reimagining. Expressive paint, layering, abstraction, and line drawing become ways of speaking across time.
At the centre of my practice is a passion for the language of colour, its psychology, universality, and seeming permanence. Through colour I seek to create a joie de vivre, an escape into another world, while also exploring more fragile emotional territories: loss, longing, nostalgia, and dystopian futures.
Again and again, my work returns to what feels most vulnerable and threatened within contemporary capitalist culture: animals, nature, innocence, and the young. These liminal subjects become vessels for tenderness, resistance, and survival.
Recent Paintings
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