“Anna Ostoya: J M Z,” Mishkin Gallery, New York, 2024

Each painting in Anna Ostoya’s exhibition “J M Z” assembles a human profile. Unlike conventional silhouettes, which are defined by a contour crisply dividing an internal blankness from an external one, these works are freighted with contrasting images and patterns from which a profile emerges like a hallucination. I use the term hallucination – lately applied to anomalies in generative AI outputs – to identify the specificity of Ostoya’s evocations of personhood. For like a digital profile, which is synthesized from diverse patterns of internet behavior (i.e., the traces of searching, liking, and consuming) in order to predict a user’s future desires, Ostoya’s profiles emerge from a cacophony of optical information. Sometimes she creates nervous, glitchy interference between patterns, and sometimes she layers painterly idioms ranging from figuration to abstraction over one another creating the effect of transparency between registers. In short, Ostoya takes a format known for minimum definition – the profile – and fills it with maximum complexity.

Anna Ostoya, “KUA,” 2024

My comparison of Ostoya’s paintings to digital images is grounded in the artist’s process. The works in “J M Z” – each measuring 22 × 26 inches – were initially derived from a series of quick sketches Ostoya made of fellow passengers on the J, M, and Z subway lines in New York City after she moved there in 2008. More than ten years later, she returned to these works as the basis for a series of digitally rendered collages that appeared as illustrations in a collaborative book she published with the political theorist Chantal Mouffe. The paintings might be considered “portraits” of digital files due to Ostoya’s effort to faithfully capture the brightness and saturation of pixilated color on screens with paint on canvas. Paradoxically, this called for great facility and skill, as the artist found that this translation required variation in texture – a kind of transposition from eye to hand. These paintings are thus profiles in a third sense: not only are they delineations of a head, and a synthesis of patterns allegorizing digital profiles, but they also profile the constituent – perhaps even ontological – nature of digital files as a form of code whose output may assume many different material formats. Such instability was further heightened by Ostoya’s installation strategy. Each of her paintings, hung on the wall in a brightly colored box frame, was transformed into a placard by connecting it to a “stand,” consisting of a long vertical support and a small horizontal base, illusionistically painted on the wall. The paintings of profiles thus literally became signs in a transformation that captures the capacity for metamorphosis in Ostoya’s works: from a quick sketch to a digital file, a labor-intensive painting, and finally, a forest of placards.

“Anna Ostoya: J M Z,” Mishkin Gallery, New York, 2024

One might detect the legacy of Surrealism in Ostoya’s work, particularly echoing the concerns of such post-Surrealist practitioners as the Chicago Imagist Ed Paschke or the younger Los Angeles artist Christina Quarles. Ostoya, like Paschke and Quarles, evokes an alienated viscerality in which the matter of a body is untethered from any commanding presence of a self – or identity – that could grant it coherence. But if Surrealist procedures of automatic drawing, chance operations, or the faithful registration of dreams were aimed at figuring an unconscious interiority that could liberate a body in pursuit of its desires, I think Ostoya’s work is engaged with exteriority, indexed in her paintings as a cacophony of contradictory visual genres. In a sense, she turns Surrealism, which projected personal desire onto the world, inside out; the void of her profiles calls forth myriad existing styles into its vacuum. In Kua (2024), for instance, the implied area of a face is bristling with divergent visual idioms. From a head-on perspective, three blue almond shapes establish eyes and lips, while in a Picassoid double entendre, the left blue “eye” also figures within a second face in three-quarter view, outlined in expanding and contracting undulating orange-gold lines. Behind both implied physiognomies lies a turning male torso rendered in a grisaille academic style, from which hard-edged abstract shapes radiate in a range of sweet pinks and purples. From this description it would seem almost impossible to convincingly hold such a multiplicity within a single image, but that is what Ostoya accomplishes in these works. Each profile is generated from, and contains within itself, a simultaneous implosion and explosion of form. A hallucinated person flashes out of this debris of art history.

At a moment when identities are being weaponized in the name of populism, Ostoya populates the frame of a self – a profile – with excessive and contradictory contents. The pleasure of these paintings is the pleasure of travesty, of dressing up a spare image – the contour of a head – in something bright and seductive, in fact a lot of bright and seductive things. It is interesting to remember that the sketches that initiated the procedures leading to the paintings in “J M Z” were of anonymous strangers in a subway car. Ostoya has filled their emptiness or opacity (to her) with a carnival of color and form. This is not exactly a projection but an act of sharing (the cultural heritage of art history) and attention (to a stranger). It might also be an effort to blur the line that separates us from one another – to recode such difference as kaleidoscopic rather than binary. In fact, the paintings are more than non-binary – they risk excess, infinity even, as a riposte to identity’s enclosure.

“Anna Ostoya: J M Z,” Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, New York, September 13–December 13, 2024.

David Joselit is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. His most recent book is Art’s Properties (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Image credit: 1.–3. courtesy of Mishkin Gallery, photos Isabel Asha Penzlien