Anouk Wolse

Anouk Wolse was born in Alberta, Canada in 1986. She began her Fine Arts education on Vancouver Island and went on to study in Australia and Italy, before completing her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Her work has been exhibited in Switzerland, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy. She currently lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.


Artist Statement

My work often involves the natural world. Many of my paintings are landscapes, sometimes populated with figures, sometimes not. Even in interior scenes, there are allusions to vegetation and plant matter. Part of my interest in nature is exploring what it says about human nature. The idealization of a place and time when we were in harmony with nature is a recurring theme in art and tells us so much about our timeless feelings of alienation and nostalgia for something that never was.

In my work, I don’t try to revisit those bucolic scenes from art history, but rather create imagined landscapes inhabited by people who could belong to any place or time. Through colour, composition, and body language, my aim is to convey scenes imbued with psychological tension that invite interpretation but resist a single narrative. The painterly application of paint, soft, rounded forms, and subtle diffusions of colour invite calm, while the expressions and poses of the figures suggest either tranquillity, thoughtfulness, and rest on the one hand or evasiveness, intrusion, anxiety, and weariness on the other. In keeping the context ambiguous, I hope to allow the viewer to explore what their interpretation reveals about their own relationship to our world.


www.anoukwolse.com