ANNIE DUNCAN
Johansson Projects is pleased to present Annie Duncan’s work at the 2025 San Francisco Art Fair in our online viewing room. Trained in painting and sculpture, Duncan uses ceramic to explore the nuances of femininity, vulnerability, and the body.
Annie Duncan
Duncan recreates representations of everyday objects generally associated with femininity, challenging binaries of growth and decay, beauty and ugliness.
“I love working in ceramic. For me, it’s the perfect medium to talk about vulnerability, femininity, and the body. When clay is wet it’s so responsive to touch, and then when it’s fired it becomes really fragile, and you can manipulate forms to be really warped and distorted.”
In “Instant Remedy” megaflora dwell in Duncan’s elixirs that mirror the human figure, recalling the association between the female form with flowers like orchids and lilies throughout art history.
…[Duncan’s] works are playful—intentionally so. But they also reflect the artist’s own anxieties about the societal pressures that women often face...
—ARTNews
Duncan challenges binaries of growth and decay, beauty and ugliness. Repositories of aspiration like the personal diary meet the self-defeat of unrealized expectations, creating a masterful balance between humor and earnestness. Duncan recreates representations of everyday objects generally associated with femininity. She brings to attention the relationship between endless consumerism and social pressure toward self-optimization.
San Francisco-based painter and sculptor Annie Duncan uses ceramics to explore the nuances of femininity, vulnerability, and the body. Duncan challenges binaries of growth and decay, beauty and ugliness. Repositories of aspiration like the personal diary meet the self-defeat of unrealized expectations, creating a masterful balance between humor and earnestness. Duncan recreates representations of everyday objects generally associated with femininity. She brings to attention the relationship between endless consumerism and social pressure toward self-optimization. Referring to classic stories like Alice in Wonderland, Duncan’s experiments with scale confront the viewer with tongue-in-cheek potions and promises that plague expressions of femininity in the contemporary moment. The megaflora that dwell in Duncan’s elixirs mirror the human figure, recalling the association between the female form with flowers like orchids and lilies throughout art history.
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 at Saint Joseph’s Art Society (San Francisco), Good Mother Gallery (Los Angeles) and Johansson Projects (Oakland), among others.