Vanessa Mitter

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

In her paintings and performances, Vanessa Mitter is interested in interrogating the history, particularly, of Expressionist painting and of the gesture. The making is very physical. The canvas is moved around, laid on the floor, then the wall, often remade or scored over, obliterated and then painted over again. Often, paintings are buried underneath other paintings. There is a narrative being referenced, but it is often hidden and autobiographical. Mitter uses layers of paint and collage, overlaid then with pen and oil stick. The making is instinctive and accident driven, often teetering on the edge of what she believes is abject failure. This tightrope is important. The painting has its own life, leads the way. Mitter views this as a process of alchemy; a transformative process. Alice Butler (Frieze Writer’s Prize Winner, 2012) writes that: ‘In Vanessa Mitter’s paintings, the personal is treated as a pliant material, a source of affect and investigation, but also of fiction and performance. Collage, paint and pigment find a way on to the canvas in ephemeral expressive gestures. There is an abject narrative at play – of childbirth, loss, fertility – but it is a narrative that wanders in and around the artifice of the material’ and ‘The textural ways in which Mitter appropriates her own work, working and re-working the surface, with the addition of a swathe of fabric, a ripped sheet of paper, or an expressive gesture of paint, becomes a signifier of the passing of time’.

Artwork