She’s done it! Warsaw gal becomes Poland's first female visual artist to win coveted Yaddo Residency
Warsaw-based artist, Maess Anand, whose work explores the life of an organism attacked by cancer, has become the first Polish female visual artist to win the residency at the artists‘ colony near Saratoga Springs, New York.
Past winners include such luminaries as Sylvia Plath, Hannah Arendt and Leonard Bernstein.
The only other Poles to be awarded a place at Yaddo were visual artist Tomasz Tatarczyk, writer Izabela Filipiak and poet Tadeusz Dąbrowski.
An artists' community located on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York Yaddo’s mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment."
On March 11, 2013 it was designated a National Historic Landmark.
Maess will stay at the colony, founded in 1926, until the end of November.
In her work, Maess focuses on both the physiological response and the mental outcome of cancer for sufferers.
Born in 1982 in Warsaw, Maess graduated in industrial design and visual communication from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (ASP), as well as completing a number of courses, including anatomy for artists at the Medical University of Warsaw.
In her work, Maess focuses on both the physiological response and the mental outcome of cancer for sufferers.
Using scientific material such cancer-related databases, microscopic views, histopathology images, Kaplan-Meier curves or 2D and 3D modeling, the artist combines these visual facts about cancer into expressive images in the hope of gaining emotional insight.
An artists' community located on a 400-acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York Yaddo’s mission is to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.
She explores how the disease changes the lives of patients and their loved ones with a particular focus on how the perception of time changes for a patient.
Maess’s work also looks into changes in the diseased body at tissue level and into how groundbreaking oncology treatments change the way that cancer is perceived in culture.
Using scientific material such cancer-related databases, microscopic views, histopathology images, Kaplan-Meier curves or 2D and 3D modeling, the artist combines these visual facts about cancer into expressive images in the hope of gaining emotional insight.
The winner of a scholarship at the Escola Superior de Artes e Design in Porto, Portugal, Maess was nominated to the Grand Prix at the FID Prize Paris in 2012 and the following year she was shortlisted to the Strabag International Art Award in Vienna, Austria.
In 2017, together with Alex Urso, Maess curated Biennale de La Biche, billed as the smallest biennale in the world and held on a desert island near Guadeloupe.
In 2017, together with Alex Urso, Maess curated Biennale de La Biche, billed as the smallest biennale in the world and held on a desert island near Guadeloupe.
She has exhibited at prestigious venues in Poland, Portugal, Italy, Argentina and the US, including the Plumba Contemporary Art, Porto (2006), Residencia Corazón, La Plata, Buenos Aires (2008), Museo di Santa Cecilia in Rome (2010), CSW Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (2010), Program Gallery in Warsaw (2011), Wroclaw Contemporary Museum (2013), Galeria Miejska Arsenal in Poznan (2013), Drawing Center in New York (2014), Polish Institute in Budapest (2015), Kasia Michalski Gallery in Warsaw, (2015),Trestle Gallery in New York (2016).
