Bio

Anoushka Akel received her MFA from the Elam School of Fine Arts in 2010. She works across a range of media, including printmaking and painting. Her work addresses a number of concerns, including art history, psychology, embodied poetics and philosophies of care. In recent years she has exhibited in Aotearoa, Australia and Japan. In 2013 Akel was the recipient of the Künstlerhäuser Worpswede residency in Bremen , Germany. In 2018 she was the C Art Trust awardee and in 2024 she was selected as a McCahon House resident.

In a 2022 Metro magazine article, curator and writer Victoria Wynne-Jones describes Akel’s paintings as objects that, ‘work through and intuit entities and felt states that verbal language cannot keep pace with … she is an artist that operates with a tremendous amount of sensitivity.’

Akel’s work is held in a number of significant collections, including the Chartwell Collection. Curator Abby Cunnane, who selected Akel for the 2018 C Art Trust Award, described her work as ‘compelling for its peculiar luminosity, and a quality of restraint, precision or poise – I think these are paintings that demand time and attention in a similar way that … narrative films do. Anoushka has spoken of her interest in painting’s capacity to hold non-linear or slow time.’

Te Haerenga Collection curator Hamish Coney selected Medieval Messaging at the 2023 Aotearoa Art Fair, and notes that although it is a work small in stature, it carries a quiet energy. ‘An Anoushka Akel painting comes freighted with some form of hushed intimacy to its engagement. An art fair is not really the ideal place for such a work to be seen or heard. However, once away from that hurly-burly the inscrutable hieroglyphics and sense that this image might be a fragment from a larger conversation make it a contemporary artefact that invites your reading.’

Exhibitions

• 2024   Michael Lett, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Carrying the Beast
  
• 2023   Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū: Spring Time is Heart-break
• 2023   Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki: Walls to Live Beside, Rooms to Own
• 2023   Aotearoa Art Fair, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland: Michael Lett
• 2020   Goya Curtain, Tokyo, Japan : (Red Legs) Hot Head
• 2019   Hopkinson Mossman, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington: Learners
• 2015   Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki: Necessary Distraction: A Painting Show