Anna Ostoya’s practice includes photography, collage, painting, sculpture, and writing. It spans multiple aesthetic traditions, often drawing on practices and histories of the twentieth century avant-garde. Rejecting the commonplace opposition of aestheticism and anti-art, Ostoya produces aesthetic objects that repeatedly direct the viewer toward the historical and institutional contexts of artistic production. Anna Ostoya questions the authority of historical narratives. She reconsiders and stresses the role of women within the avant-garde, and analyzes both central and peripheral phenomena in historical and geographical terms.
Anna Ostoya was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1978. She lives and works in New York. Ostoya attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (2009, US) and studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt / M (2006, DE) and at the Parsons School of Art and Design in Paris (2001, FR). Ostoya made solo exhibitions at a.o. Zacheta National Gallery, Warsaw (2017, PL); La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Mulhouse (2014, FR); Foksal Gallery Warsaw (2010, PL); Center for Contemporary Art, Kronika (2010, PL). Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz (2019, CH); Tate St. Ives, St. Ives, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, and The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2018, UK); Foksal Gallery, Warsaw (2016, PL); Boghossian Foundation, Brussels (2016, BE); Biennale de Lyon, Lyon (2015, FR); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013, US); The Power Plant, Toronto and Art Gallery of Alberta, Alberta (2011, CA); 2nd Athens Biennale (2009, GR); CCS Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2009, US); Manifesta 7, Rovereto (2008, IT).
Her paintings were on display in Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting, Phaidon Press, 2016. The work of Anna Ostoya is included in international private and museum collections.