About

Anna Mathai is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco with a practice including mixed media painting and sculpture, plaster murals, and writing.  She creates dynamic sculptural and textured works that use color, light, texture, and shadow to tell her story. She frequently works with different kinds of plaster, including Venetian plaster and limestone. Her goal is to create things that hold some sort of strange magic, and so she likes to experiment with and create new methods to create dimension and texture in her work (like her “canvas kintsugi” and hardened silk origamis).  Mathai makes works that interact with their viewers and the light around them, reflecting, shifting colors, jumping out of the canvas to mingle art and enjoyer, to transcend viewing into experiencing.

Mathai was born in the UK to Indian parents, but spent most of her childhood in the rural Deep South of the United States, which has heavily influenced the concepts she explores in her art. She feels that the aesthetic (and a touch of irreverence) is paramount; however, on the “series level” her works often translate feelings of rebellion, “otherness”, and the constructed self, with a touch of mysticality. Through her work, she explores the world’s dualities. In her mind, her work generally reflects on boundaries, both real and imagined, and blurs them. Her work has been awarded, featured in international art magazines, and exhibited across the world. 

In her other time, she writes poetry, lyrics and screenplays, enjoys nature with her Australian Shepherd, Cowboy, and tests jokes on friends and family.