The Galbut Institute is pleased to present She, an exhibition of four recent large-scale paintings by the artist Anna Vickers. Painted between 2020 and 2025, these works continue Vickers’s long-standing exploration of the female nude subject, engaging both its art-historical legacy and the layers of critique that have since reframed it.

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The yellow hues that dominated Vickers’s Coming series introduce these works in the painting Blues 1. They transition from a symbol of waste into the soft yellow haze of early sunrise — illuminating spaces of blue, oceanic atmosphere throughout all four works.

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Borrowing its title from Charles Aznavour’s 1974 chanson of the same name, She slips into Sea : a sonic and visual slippage that mirrors the paintings themselves, where the figures dissolve into this new oceanic state.

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Like Aznavour’s vocal lines unfurling upward as though lifted off the ground, Vickers’s storm-swept figures ascend through breaching, tempestuous gestures — splashes and spirals that evoke cresting waves, hurricanes, and tornadic updrafts. As the figures rise, they diffuse into the atmosphere, their bodies evaporating into coiling currents. By the time they reach the cosmos, they are fully atomized — weightless shimmers within a twinkling starfield, echoing the exalted shimmer of the word She as sung by Aznavour. Just as Aznavour imbues that word with reverence through melodic lift, Vickers renders her figures sublime — in their literal passage from solid to vapor, and in their exaltation.

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Action emerges as a primary theme across these new works. It’s felt in the depiction of elemental forces, the drama of sweeping gestures, and in the layers of visible mark-making that accumulate to form each painting’s atmosphere. Action doesn’t dismantle the figure; rather, it subsumes it until figure and force become indistinguishable, and the sole worldly quality of the figure that remains is action.

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To download the exhibition's press release, please click here.

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