Kim Anno paints in translucent oil on shimmering aluminum, layering thin washes of intensely glowing color onto the hard metallic surface to create, in her words, “a provocation between illusionism and abstraction.” Anno’s thin veils of paint barely contain the inner light of the metal’s cool, reflective surface and have evoked comparisons to Morris Louis and Barnet Newman. Anno also works reductively, unveiling the surface as much as she veils it and marking out fine, loopy lines by hand that swirl casually over the picture plane, both implying and defying a fragmented narrative.

Originally from Los Angeles, Kim Anno lives and works in Berkely, California. She has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums in California, as well as nationally and internationally, since 1983. Her work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Research Institute, Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Brooklyn Museum, Yale University Library, the Honolulu Academy of Fine Art, the Herzog-Anton Ulrich Museum, Germany and the Oakland Museum, Oakland, California, among others. Anno has been awarded numerous grants and awards including, the Fleishhaker Foundation Fellowship from the Eureka Foundation, a Gerbode Foundation Purchase Award for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Honolulu Academy of Art Museum, Western States Regional/National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Creative Work Fund grant of the Walter and Elise Haas Foundation, the Joseph S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellowship at Yaddo for her collaboration with Anne Carson, and the Flintridge Foundation Fellowship.