New Work
Anita Ragusa

May 27 – June 21, 2008

Ragusa’s lush, vibrant oil paintings are both nostalgic and new. For her visual vocabulary the artist draws from the architecture, fashion and furnishings of her childhood in Sarajevo - chandeliers, elaborate custom made jewelry, exotic feathers, ornate furniture, and vintage textile designs. Layered on her personal history are fantasy and delicate detail from Ragusa’s literary influences of the Symbolist and decadent aesthetic such as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and A Rebours by J. K. Hysmans. Descriptive passages from each of these texts inform the artist’s lavish modern day veritas. “Small, and jewel-like, Ragusa’s loosely rendered paintings are reminiscent of Elizabeth Payton in their use of rich colors and treatment of the surface. Romantic and nostalgic in the best sense, Anita creates wonderfully self-contained worlds within her work that still manage to have a dialogue with the contemporary discourse of painting” (Jaishri Abichandani, Queens Museum of Art).

View the Press Release here.