Bio
Anastasia Pelias was born in New Orleans, LA to a Greek immigrant mother and a first generation Greek-American father. She received her BFA from the Newcomb College of Tulane University in 1981, and her MFA from the University of New Orleans in 1996. Pelias has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums nationwide, and has been featured in publications including Hyperallergic, New American Paintings, Artnet news, ArtDaily, Forbes, Pelican Bomb and New Orleans Art Review. Her work appears in the permanent collections at the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; the Mobile Museum of Art, Alabama; Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, and in private and public collections worldwide.
Pelias’ work has been featured in notable exhibitions including The Whole Drum Will Sound: Women in Southern Abstraction at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in 2018, and Per(Sister): Incarcerated Women in Louisiana at Newcomb Art Museum in 2019 and at the Ford Foundation Gallery in 2020. In 2018, Pelias was commissioned by the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, TX to to make a site-specific sculpture and painting installation. In 2020, Pelias was commissioned by the Domain Companies to create a 54 foot mural at the Odeon Building in New Orleans. In 2020 she was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Residency. Pelias was a selected artist in the Prospect.5 Triennial, 2021-22, where she exhibited a site-specific multi sensory installation involving sculpture, a painted landscape, sound and scent.
Artist Statement
I am a multidisciplinary artist – my bodies of work include oil paintings on canvas, works on paper, sculpture, video and multi-dimensional site-specific and site-responsive installations. The human-size scale of my interactions with diverse media allows the viewer to immerse themselves in the work as opposed to simply being an observer. I consider all of my work to be painting, even though it may not look like painting.
In my studio practice, I unapologetically embrace subjects of love, sex, death, destiny, and the human experience - in particular the female experience. The dual cultural identity of both my native New Orleans and my ancestral roots in Skopelos Greece profoundly inform my work. I am engaged with Greek rituals and ideas about fate and destiny as well as the rich pageantry of New Orleans culture. Deep ancestral connections that are ever-present, that resonate even if they are not always understood, find their way into my work.
While I am working, I enter a space where I avoid conscious thought. I embrace a process that is both intuitive and intentional. I am drawn to content and meaning, abstraction and gesture, and the materiality of paint. Color and its emotional power is a critical component in all of my work. I believe in the power of painting and its ability to evoke a visceral response from the viewer, and to change how people see the world. I want to create work that is full of emotion and visual pleasure.