Lot 220 - Annis Harrison - Opuntia

Oil on canvas
2025
A6 (10x15cm)
Original Artwork
Signed on Verso
Curated by Art on a Postcard

About
Annis Harrison is a multi-disciplinary contemporary artist. Her work includes painting, drawing, ceramics, and sculpture. Through various projects she seeks to explore how her personal history together with her Caribbean heritage intersects with the wider diasporic experience. She is interested in exposing what has been lost, hidden, and stripped away. Looking at often fleeting, unrecognised moments like tears in the history of British colonialist culture.

Education
BA Hons degree in Painting at Central St Martins 1996
Advance Photography at Central St Martins 1997
Computer Animation at Central St Martins 1998

Solo Exhibitions
2023
Duppy Dance, Quench Gallery, Margate

2021
Mamma's Black Heroes, BMECP Centre, Brighton

2020
I Can’t See Myself, V.O Curations, London

2017
Forbidden Fruit, Pop up Ceramics, London

2016
New Ceramics, Pop up Gallery, Paris

1996
One Woman Show, Galleria Wilfredo Lam, Cuba

Group Exhibitions
2024
Cubitt Invites, Cubitt Gallery and Studios, London, UK
Reframing The Muse, Kendrew Barn, Oxford, UK
Blink, Room Share 5, Safe House, London, UK

2023
Tableaux: Painting as a Stage, Terrace Gallery, London, UK
Hospital Room - Holding Space, Bonhams Auction House & Hauser Wirth, London, UK

2022
Collectivist, Copeland Gallery, London, UK
Power to Emotion, Tart Gallery, London, UK
Cubitt30, Victoria Miro, London, UK
Cubitt30, Vortic, London, UK
LGBTQ+ Heroes Past and Present, Ledward Centre, Brighton, UK

2021
Among Other Beautiful Black Made Things, Black Pound Shop, London, UK
The Black Lives Matter UK, Virtual Gallery
Queer Heterotopia, Ledward Centre, Brighton, UK

2020
What Does Black Art Mean to You?, Lyric Square, London, UK
Queering the Art Classroom, Sutton House, Hackney, London, UK

2019
RIOT SOUP, HArts Lane, London, UK

Awards
Royal Arts Prize IV. Edition (Second place award)

Public Collections
UCL, London, UK
Zabludowicz Collection, London, UK

Statement about AOAP Submitted Artwork
The painting Opuntia is connected to my current body of work ‘Memory of Joy’. The work is a series of vibrant oil paintings depicting sensuous fruits from the Caribbean and embody the joy of a first taste.

Particularly for Caribbean descendants in the UK whose memories of finally experiencing these fruits may have come much later in life, feeling like a reclaiming.

The abstracted curved, plump, and glistening forms of the paintings are as much fruits as they are bodies. The shapes seamlessly intertwine and break down leaving the viewer scanning the image to find moments of corporeal pleasure that sit right on the edge of both and neither.