Annie Duncan
Johansson Projects presents San Francisco-based artist Annie Duncan’s recent works in our online viewing room. Many of these works were shown in a pop-up exhibition this summer at Saint Joseph’s Art Society. For the past few years, “Duncan has explored the expanded symbolism of consumer objects and how they frame femininity as slippery or malleable, yet something that has historically formed (or at least informed) a person’s relationship with the world” writes Katherine Jemima Hamilton. She explores these themes through oversized hand-worked ceramics and still life paintings.
Annie Duncan
Annie Duncan (b. 1997, San Francisco, California) makes paintings and ceramic sculptures that explore femininity, symbolism, and art historical references. Leaning into her affinity for collecting, sorting, and obsessing over objects, her work finds humor, heartbreak, joy, and meaning in the jumbled world we inhabit. She received a BA from Vassar College in 2019 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2023. Annie was a featured artist with Plunge Towels. She has shown her work in California and New York.
Video by Jaminh Alcorn
By macerating a historical painting genre with the aesthetics of consumer-identity capitalism, Duncan insists that the history of women’s relationship to things must be studied, as modern capitalism attempts to sell us back our identities in pretty prim packages.
- Katherine Jemima Hamilton
About the Artist
Annie Duncan makes large-scale still lifes—both in the form of acrylic paintings and ceramic sculptures. Working directly from life, she creates alluring compositions that evoke the pile on top of a dresser, the emptied contents of a purse, or the chaos on the floor of a bedroom. In these saturated and distorted works, she explores the power of objects as symbols and storytelling devices. In traditional still life painting, elements like flowers or shells are used as allusions to the female body. She explores these symbols and pairs them with more contemporary references—objects like a plastic razor, an IUD, accessories, or beauty products—that encapsulate aspirational ideals of gender, femininity, and sexuality. In scaling up the objects, she emphasizes their cultural and personal significance, reframing their historical value.
Disposable razors, oversize IUDs: Annie Duncan plumbs intimacy of everyday objects | January 3, 2024 by Mary Corbin
“With both paint and clay, artist Annie Duncan evokes nostalgia in everyday feminine objects. A tube of lipstick, a hair clip, a perfume bottle, all stir up emotion within the context of the familiar and the symbolic in our lives. With humor and poignancy, Duncan plumbs how these intimate objects, often way oversized in scale, can conjure a particular joyful—or heartbreaking—moment.” LINK
ARTNews: The Best Booths at Untitled Art Miami Beach, From Potato Sculptures to Ominous Razors | December 6, 2023 by Maximilíano Durón “…At first glance [Annie Duncan’s] works are playful—intentionally so. But they also reflect the artist’s own anxieties about the societal pressures that women often face: rendered at an ominously large scale, the sculptures turn small objects associated with femininity and beauty nightmarishly big…” LINK
Nothing Without Desire: Annie Duncan’s Objects Can’t Live Without You | July 13, 2023 by Katherine Jemima Hamilton
“By macerating a historical painting genre with the aesthetics of consumer-identity capitalism, Duncan insists that the history of women’s relationship to things must be studied, as modern capitalism attempts to sell us back our identities in pretty prim packages.” LINK
Annie Duncan (b. 1997, San Francisco, California) makes paintings and ceramic sculptures that explore femininity, symbolism, and art historical references. Leaning into her affinity for collecting, sorting, and obsessing over objects, her work finds humor, heartbreak, joy, and meaning in the jumbled world we inhabit. She received a BA from Vassar College in 2019 and an MFA from California College of the Arts in 2023. Annie was a featured artist with Plunge Towels. She has shown her work in California and New York.