Anna Kunz: Echolocation and Flood Tide
In her new Echolocation prints—like the earlier Flood Tide monotypes published by Manneken Press in 2021—Anna Kunz again turns to the ocean for inspiration: its hypnotic rhythms, cyclical movements, and pervasive sense of mystery. Kunz has described the ocean as “the most abstract space in nature.” The title Echolocation refers to the physiological process used by marine mammals and bats as an extension of sight, enabling them to move through space and identify objects. Kunz draws a visual parallel between this sonic navigation and her own use of vibrational color to compose, guide the viewer’s eye into unfamiliar relationships, and give form to the intangible.
Working through an intuitive process of call and response, Kunz distills her compositions to essential geometric forms and fields of color, charging them with energy and inviting multiple points of entry into the pictorial space. Opaque and transparent hues—her signature vocabulary—are choreographed across the porous surface of the paper, creating layered, symphonic structures. While working at Manneken Press, the studio filled with the ambient music of Brian Eno, which, by chance, provided an additional sonic influence on the echoing forms and chromatic resonances that define these works.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Anna Kunz is a Chicago-based artist whose work spans painting, sculpture, and installation. Rooted in a rigorous generative process, her practice dissolves hierarchies between media and sensory experience. Kunz often employs painted and dyed fabrics that function like nets, capturing and modulating light and color to create immersive, participatory environments. Her work affirms the enduring capacity of painting to offer spaces of contemplation, unity, and joy. She has also collaborated with architects, musicians, and dancers—including Merce Cunningham Dance Company, The Performance Collective, and Industry of the Ordinary—to develop environments for dance and theatrical productions.
Kunz’s work has been exhibited widely, with recent solo exhibitions at Alexander Berggruen Gallery, New York; Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco; Galerie Urbane, Dallas; and McCormick Gallery, Chicago. In 2018, the Hyde Park Art Center presented Color Cast, a large-scale installation. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections.
Kunz has participated in residencies at the Golden Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Space Program at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, the Monira Foundation, and the Roger Brown Artist Residency, among others. She has received nominations and honors from organizations including Anonymous Was a Woman, 3Arts, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Emerging Artist Award), Artadia, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Kunz holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Northwestern University.
