Anna Gonzalez
I recall my childhood living under the clerical fascism regime led by Francisco Franco. This experience has conditioned me with firm rejection towards autocratic ideology. In this series of work, my newfound interest in photography has brought me to a ground of playfulness where I have explored stories that evoke personal guilt and transforming them into surreal nonsense. Incorporating paper mache, sculpture, dioramas and photography; remnants of absurdity, irony and cruelty is imbued within my work. Each composition orbits into various associations to the darkest corners of my life.
Image: Anna Gonzalez, Running Away, 2020, archival print, 50 x 75 cm
Queensland College of Art and Design Master of Visual Arts graduate Anna Gonzalez is an Australian artist who lives and works in Brisbane. She was born in Barcelona, Spain, to a generation that lived through a long dictatorial military regime. Along with the despotic ruling institution of the Spanish Catholic Church, she has personally experienced discrimination and oppression towards women most of her life.
Art has been a remarkable tool for Anna to canalize the horrible memories of witnessing friends and family members falling victims to torture, imprisonment and banishment to second class citizens under the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco. Counter to her experience, Anna has always refused to live a bitter life as she thought that will only contributes to the success of the aggressor. She has used her puzzling emotional burden through a world full of irrational madness as a catalyst to her work and considers herself as a visual storyteller. Blending religious and cultural symbols with parody and surrealism, Anna compose humourous artworks with twist of darkness.
She is well versed in various medium with printmaking and tempera painting being her preferred mediums for many years. Anna has later included sgraffito in her practice where she uses a scratching technique through layers of paint on aluminum plates. Recently, she started incorporating photography and sculpture to her work where she creates dioramas with old drawings, paintings, paper sculptures and collages that reflects life absurdities. She then composes photographic images where the photos become the work of art.
Anna has exhibited her artworks nationally and internationally. She has been a finalist in the Blake Prize for Religious Art, Redland Art Award, Lethbridge 10000 and 20000, and Clayton Utz Art Prize. She was commissioned by Mater Private Hospital to produce 13 paintings for their maternity rooms, and her works are in various private collections in Australia, Spain and Switzerland.
Hocus Sulcus images
