PRESS RELEASE
Margaret Thatcher Projects is pleased to present Nature and Circumstance, an exhibition of abstract digital paintings by Anna Bogatin Ott, the artist's second solo show at the gallery. The exhibition will open on Thursday, July 20, and continue through Friday, August 18, 2023. There will be a reception for the artist on Thursday, July 27, from 5 to 7 PM.
Anna Bogatin Ott's digital work on aluminum, like her acrylic paintings, utilizes lines to emphasize the significance of the order, harmony, and overall beauty found in nature, ultimately offering a fresh look into a familiar reality. Bogatin Ott begins these works with meticulous observation of her own photographs of the natural world, including landscapes, sunsets, sunrises and bodies of water. Though the artist's inspiration is often terrestrial, this exhibition also includes work based on NASA imagery of celestial bodies within our solar system. After a concentrated pixel-by-pixel examination of each source image, Bogatin Ott reveals a new abstract composition by stretching chosen individual pixels horizontally so they glide uninterruptedly across the metallic surface of the works.
The artist makes use of stripped-down aesthetics and minimalist sensibilities to embrace perception, color, and materiality. Deeply spiritual and psychological, her work focuses on bringing forth a sense of structure and equilibrium. The greatest challenge facing the artist when transmuting a representational image into one of these highly meditative works also happens to be the most exciting part for her: the process of selection. She attempts to find a "perfect" pixel line within the photo reference that creates an image equally as, or more impactful than the moment the photograph was taken. Purity and authenticity are essential for the artist; therefore, she does not manipulate the image to obtain a more pleasing visual; the result is quite naturalistic. "I don’t invent colors or composition – I find them. It is very pure that way," she asserts.
Bogatin Ott's wish is to encapsulate the transient quality of a single moment or emotion in a condensed image while maintaining the integrity of the original source. The moments captured in these works hold truthfulness and rarity—in the artist's words, "nothing in life happens twice." This, coupled with the fact that each digital painting is unique, preserves the ephemeral essence of a moment in time that can ultimately be relived through a new lens. A quiet, contemplative viewing of her work balances our innate instincts and intellectual aspirations for serenity and joy.
Anna Bogatin Ott is an American artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA. She was born in Ukraine in 1970, and prior to coming to the United States in 1992, has lived in Russia, the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine and Poland. After a traditional arts education in Russia, she earned a BFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally since the early 2000s. It is in numerous private and public collections, including the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Fort Collins, CO; the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia.