About Anita Toscani
Her inspiration is the natural world and the human body; the expression of love – be it between a parent and a child or between a couple. Her abstract bronzes are never so far removed from the figurative as to become unrecognisable but she also creates purely abstract pieces, organic forms based on nature or inspired by music.
“I feel that there comes a point when there is a ‘rightness’ to interacting shapes and a tension to a curve…” and it is for this that she is continually searching in her abstract work.
A recent passion is to express the acceptance and calm with which the suffering of innocent victims is born particularly by women and children, be it famine, war or abuse of any sort. “I want to honour these victims in some small way”
“Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye… it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.” Edvard Munch
My work is almost always inspired by being alive. It is an effort on my part to express the strong emotions which arise from the human condition. Love or devastation at man’s inhumanity to man, nature or music being the more abstract.
Sometimes shapes which I find beautiful just appear out of the stone or clay. The interaction between shapes, the tension of the lines. These can hold or collapse and ruin a piece. It is like adding soap to release the surface tension of water, the meniscus loses integrity. Then, the tension, lost.
Project spotlight
The silent scream
The pair of swans
On seeing Anita’s sculpture for the first time I was immediately drawn to the quiet delicate beauty of her work that is not always associated with sculpture. Abstracting the subject but retaining the figurative aspect she draws the viewer to engage with the tactile composition of her sculpture. In ‘Ora’ there is the perfect balance between the smoothness of the outer swirl with the lines of texture in the inner part. It has a restrained equilibrium between these two surface textures that echoes the natural found object.
Mark Jerram The Jerram Gallery
