by Victor von Krasowski
For the London-based artist Anna Kiparis, biblical stories are not simply sacred texts, but a vast archive of human experience — one through which she examines love, motherhood, war, loss, femininity, and transformation. Her work moves between the personal and the universal, bringing together religious imagery, the female body, animals, stone, and the visual language of the Baroque to explore experiences that are difficult to contain in words.
We spoke with Anna about the Bible as a source of human knowledge, her fascination with the Baroque, and her search for ways to speak about death without making it beautiful.
Your work often explores powerful symbols connected to femininity, spirituality, and identity. How did these themes begin to appear in your practice?
My first conscious engagement with religious texts came shortly before the war began, and I am still searching for an answer to the question of what we are failing to understand: what makes us continue to kill one another. My goal is not a path towards faith, but a search for ways to teach the mind to survive without simply shutting out the news. I want to speak up about what is happening. I want to speak about it with other people, to make feelings visible, and to advocate for creation as an alternative to destruction.
Your recent work draws from very personal experiences. How do you decide what parts of your personal story become part of your artistic language?
The experience that makes us human and, in my case, the experience that makes me an artist is not simply the discovery of emotions, but the exploration of their complete cycle: their birth, their existence, and their death. In my latest project, A Time to Cast Away Stones, I propose examining familiar stories in their entirety, as complete cycles. For example, the story of the Great Flood unfolds across three scenes in this series: Noah’s encounter with God, forty days and forty nights of rain, and God’s covenant with the earth, witnessed by the eight survivors as they see the rainbow above the water.
The Flood
Oil on lazuli
15 × 23 cm
The end of all flesh has come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them
Genesis 6:13
The personal reason I became interested in this circular structure of catastrophe came from my own observations about love and death. For me, in terms of how they are structured, love and death are almost the same thing. Since 2020, many of those reading this have experienced several kinds of death: war, emigration, separation from loved ones, and the loss of the life they once knew. In my case, all of this happened alongside motherhood, which seemed destined to become the thing that would defeat death, because it is ultimately a joyful experience, filled with love. Yet I discovered that within tragedy, love can become distorted; it can lose both its beauty and its sense of belonging.
There is something about the way a young mother experiences the death of her former life — the life that existed before motherhood, when she loses her connection with the world in exchange for the privilege of giving life to someone else — in which love begins to feel like death. The unconditional nature of maternal love is as absolute as the fact of disappearance. It is an incredibly radical and uncompromising story, without half-tones or shades of grey, without instructions for survival — only the heart’s command to love or die.
Many people experience tension between social expectations and their own sense of identity. Has your artistic practice helped you understand or redefine yourself beyond the roles traditionally expected of women?
My work with femininity and sensuality is deliberately abstract and, contrary to the more familiar tendency among women artists to speak from a personal perspective, I try to investigate those experiences without speaking exclusively in the first person. My art similarly proposes looking at the world not from the perspective of a human being, but from that of a cow—a living, feeling creature which, returning to your question, has an analogy with motherhood and femininity.
My use of personal experience again comes back to the relationship between love and death. I am still living through this experience and learning how to live with it. I could divide my exploration into several chapters. The first ended with motherhood; the second is happening now, as I choose to move forward alone.
The project about the Madonna and the Whore marked this second transition. For twenty years I was a wife and a mother, an orthodox devotee, a Madonna, a sacred cow, if you like. Now I don’t want to take on roles; I want, on the contrary, to free myself from the possibility of being assigned any role at all. This is undoubtedly a challenge to myself, and I am very proud of myself for having the courage to accept this decision as the only right one.
Your work brings together religious references, biblical imagery, and representations of the female body. What interests you about the meeting point between the sacred and the sensual?
After a year of experimentation, I am returning to a direction that demands a high level of concentration and technical mastery — to where I began, when I first started painting scenes with cows onto stone. I love that this work allows me to draw on my skills in academic painting and traditional composition. I am proud to have developed those skills, and to have the opportunity to keep refining them.
When I paint, I become completely liberated. I stop being the person I am, more or less, for the rest of the time. You could say that when I paint, I feel happy. Like a blessed person who sees images of Christ everywhere, I see scenes in the patterns of a cut stone. I work with its palette and landscape as though they were traces of an ancient event, and I feel a kind of responsibility towards the stone—to have earned the right to tell its story anew.
I learned a great deal from my longtime friend Masha Burganova-Yaltanskaya, who graduated from school with the highest marks in physics and mathematics in all of Moscow, but chose to become an icon painter. She revealed many extraordinary secrets to me, including how almost anything can be created from just four colours: burnt ochre, ochre, black, and white. Yes, even blue, yellow, pink, and lilac.
As for subject matter, I combine personal experience with what troubles the people close to me. When we become desperate to believe and wait for the war to end, for love to become mutual, for our children to grow up, and for us finally to become a little happier, we want to find somewhere to direct our creative energy. We want to stop reading our own lives as unique phenomena and instead understand them as part of a broader human experience. After all, we all experience more or less the same things, and all that remains is to feel something and perhaps understand something. I think that is what the Bible is for, and what makes it useful today.
Red Skies
Rhodonite, oil and gold
20 x 18 cm
You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times
Matthew 16:3
After such a transformative period in your life, what questions are you interested in exploring next through your work?
It is not so much about what comes next as about my desire to continue working with the Baroque. I don’t know what fascinates me more about it in the conventional sense: its attempt to make beauty more complex, or the philosophical concepts that allow us to understand the Baroque as a way of perceiving the world.
Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the fold, developed in his book The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, I imagine Baroque drapery in which each fold, as it changes, causes the entire fabric to shift. There is something beautiful about this complexity and about the particular interconnectedness of events. For me, it corresponds very closely to the way I understand the world: events, relationships with other people, the workings of our emotions — everything is connected, both internally and to everything around it.
Surprisingly, the concept also has a strong relationship with science. Remember those demonstrations of how gravity works, where a piece of fabric is stretched out, and objects of different sizes and weights are placed on it? The fabric responds differently to each one. It is almost like Baroque drapery, demonstrating different densities — in other words, the different weight or significance of an event.
It is important for me to preserve beauty in my work, and to communicate the pleasure I experience while creating it. The most difficult question that the Baroque poses — and that I am posing to myself in my future work — is how to work with death. Baroque art often poeticises death, making it beautiful by placing dead bodies alongside the living and playing with subtle variations of colour and tone; it can even place martyrdom alongside vanity. I am searching for ways to speak about death without beautifying it. I believe that will be my main task over the coming year.
How to find Anna:
https://www.instagram.com/kiparis_ann/
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