About
Anna Kiparis is an artist currently residing in London.
Anna illustrates fiction in the style of Orthodox icons, highlighting the connection between religious and literary texts through potent symbols and images researched through painting, installation, performance, and digital art.

For over 10 years, Anna has been collaborating with various museums and institutions, serving as the author of art projects, educational programs and performances at the intersection of art, literature, and architecture.
Among Anna's accolades are the UNI Award and the Johan Huizinga Peace Prize for manifesto-driven works that address issues of war, violence, and dictatorship.

Contact Anna Kiparis: cypressfeed@gmail.com
Current works /
The Passion of the Cows, Quadriptich
At the core of this series of artworks lies Gabriel Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, 'The Autumn of the Patriarch.' While the novel serves as a collective portrayal of dictators throughout history, the central scene illustrates human fear and hope. People do not believe that the patriarch is deceased, and it is only when they spot a living cow on the balcony of his palace that they comprehend the absence of any living being inside. Thus, the cow becomes a symbol of liberation from dictatorship. This series of artworks is presented in the canon of the Orthodox icon and serves as icons for prayers for the end of war.
1/4
Hope for Rebirth
At the core of this icon lies the birth, but in the cave where the prophet was supposed to appear, there are only cows. The world anticipates a new era that will commence with the end of war. Cows, akin to the prophet, bear the symbol of liberation. Their presence somehow marks a portal leading to the patriarch's palace, which is filled with cows.

Materials: oil on canvas, gold
Size: 30x30 cm
2/4
Introduction to the Patriarch's Palace
This moment is associated with one of the great church holidays when the Most Holy Mother of God was brought to the Jerusalem temple by her parents to be consecrated to God. Cows enter the palace and discover the body of the patriarch. In the background, you can see a staircase leading to a balcony, where one of the cows is about to ascend.

Materials: oil on canvas, gold
Size: 30x30 cm
3/4
Vigilant Eye
Young Chrysus lay down to rest on the way from Jerusalem to Nazareth, and the Most Holy Mother of God watched over his sleep. During this time, angels predicted to her the sufferings of Christ on the cross. Cows stand around a basin in which the patriarch's offering is made. This comparison of human flesh to a calf, and the cows seemingly proclaim the good news, while the patriarch is already dead.

Materials: oil on canvas, gold
Size: 30x30 cm
4/4
Nativity Scene
The Eye of the Lord bleeds, unable to see salvation. The bed intended for childbirth remains empty. The world still awaits the coming of a new prophet and a second advent.

Materials: oil on canvas, gold
Size: 30x30 cm
Artist's statement
I appreciate magical realism because, unlike science fiction, which always functions as a packaging of reality, magical realism, on the contrary, aims to unpack reality. It offers a system of images capable of self-organizing during the reading process, often using non-human agents, such as plants, animals, and insects.

I adore all these cows, butterflies, and molluscs because, in my view, it's an effortless and incredibly rapid way to retransmit the semantic self-organization of storytelling through simple animal behaviour patterns. Animals must procure food, seek a safe environment, and produce offspring. Deleuze brilliantly illustrated this when he, in his alphabet, provided examples of the simplest insects, ticks, and lice, which have only three actions they need to perform in their lives: find a place to hide, jump on prey at the right moment, and attach.

By receiving an analogy in the form of an animal, we automatically interpret its behaviour pattern and transpose it into the progression of emotions. For example, yellow butterflies whimsically swarming above the protagonist's head in Garcia Marquez's work reflect the painfully rapid degeneration of human attachment. The butterflies, in the form of flashes of biomass, burn out within a day, creating a vivid visual image when reading.
In contrast, the cows that have taken over the patriarch's castle symbolize gradual changes. In scale, the cows resemble pieces of furniture that clutter the palace; they move unhurriedly, destroying former luxury, chewing on velvet curtains, and leaving cow pies on silk carpets.

Modern artist, art theorist, and curator Dmitry Bulatov aptly describes the direction of my art in his notes:
When the freedom of artistic thought is taken to the extreme (as in Duchamp's "Fountain"), art enters a domain closely related to religion. The discussion of such "religiousness" in art is not coincidental, given that "Religio" (Latin) also means "I bind" or "I connect." This is the search and exploration of connections between earthly and unearthly, human and non-human agents, relations within a community, a biome (or society), and links between a person and dominant discourses (commandments) and institutions. These relationships can be viewed as ways of establishing connections on a secular level (between people, believers, and non-believers) and between a person and God. What is intriguing is that all of these methods are based on aesthetics if we understand aesthetic sensibility as the ability of a person (or, for example, AI and generative neural networks) to react to the connecting pattern.
Events
Anna regularly holds exhibitions and meetings with her audience and talks about current projects, as a significant part of the artist's work involves the exploration of text
Coming Soon
February 2024
King's College London
Exhibition
November 30 - December 09, 2023
Exhibition
September 30, 2023
Artist Talk, Fair and Exhibition
September 16, 2023
Artist talk and exhibition
Selected projects
Performance
This site was made on Tilda — a website builder that helps to create a website without any code
Create a website