We’re thrilled to present a new series of work by Shanti Shea An, launching as part of our April Collection.
Shanti’s practice explores how images are read, translated, and transformed through painting, bringing together references from mass media, art history, and personal photography.
Her works often sit in a space between clarity and ambiguity, where an image can shift between something recognisable and something more abstract or unresolved.
As Shanti describes:
“Whenever I’m making a painting I’m trying to tune into when a picture slips… when it flickers between a surface of forms and some kind of story.”
In 2024, she completed her PhD at the ANU School of Art & Design, where her research focused on ideas of doubling, legibility, and the instability of meaning in painting.
Launching Sunday 12 April, 10am AEDT
Sign up to our VIP collectors list via link in bio to receive 24-hour pre-sale access.
You have until this Saturday, 20th December to go see this painting, ‘Not bad for soup’ (2025), out of the studio (pictured) and on the wall in top notch company at @velvet.lobster in Sydney.
Also! We got a write up in @_artshub , thank you @miya.sywak ❤️
Install photography: @exhibition.archive
Looking back at this little work from 2021, a painting I made at the beginning of my PhD @anuartdesign where I was thinking about the translation of reading into painting. Figure turning away, absorbed in some other interior world beyond the frame. Books on shelves as containers of ideas—the world made knowable, portable, and compressed in a series of strange rectangles
‘A thought from behind’, 2021, oil on canvas
#painting
Sidelong glance, 2025
(Vermeer, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, c1663; Piero della Francesca, Flagellation of Christ, c1468-70)
In ‘Shrimp Show’ @velvet.lobster celebrating 1 year since opening💚 2-20 December
