Anastasia BayTiptoe

Anastasia Bay (1988) lives and works in Brussels. From 2007 to 2012, she studied Fine Arts at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Those years and her professor François Boisrond (a key character of the Figuration Libre movement) deeply shaped her mind and her way of looking. She got very inspired (along with others) by René Daumal, Philip Guston, Jim Shaw, Gasiorowski, but her practice as a painter came later. Painting came when she has been able to emancipate it from all the academic aspects, by existing as painting and no longer as a subject to be defended. In 2013, she moved to Brussels, where she also co-founded the exhibition platform: Clovis XV. Anastasia Bay, with her fascinating gesture and boldly shaped practice, has been represented in numerous solo and group exhibitions in France, Belgium, Germany, and abroad.

Anastasia Bay’s exhibition ‘Tip Toe’ showcases a series of works referring to staging characters strongly inspired by Egyptian antics representations and drawings. The figures are pined up and frozen in their movement and position looking like a music score, fragile but stable. Every single body element like « incorporated in a freeze-frame time » give a feeling of action and movement, also a feeling of the state of passage between a world and another. « Dance macabre » or « tip-toe escape », the rough, accurate, and poetic lines depict relationship and group dynamic. Through contrasted and balanced colors and shapes, Anastasia Bay plays with the figure-ground relationship. In « Tip-Toe », her lines are getting closer and closer to the line of American comics and rounder shapes “à la” Robert Crumb or Saul Steinberg. The round strokes are transformed into patterns, like a frieze subtly made up of transparencies revealing mistakes, erased lines, and the fragility of each choice. In the space, the configuration creates a voluntary face-to-face with the viewer. The human-sized figures invite us to follow them in their dance, to fix the time suspended and walk together in their fascinating world ...