From Leipzig to Ashburton, the Ōtepoti/Dunedin artist reflects on nostalgia, nature, and the power of paint to speak across generations.
For more than 25 years, Ōtepoti/Dunedin artist Anita DeSoto has built a remarkable career, exhibiting throughout New Zealand and internationally while creating richly layered figurative paintings that challenge, inspire, and invite reflection. Holding a Master of Fine Arts, Anita taught Drawing and Painting at the Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, from 2004–2024, while continuing to develop a practice that has earned prestigious residencies and fellowships in New Zealand and overseas. These include the Leipzig International Art Programme in Germany, New Pacific Studios in San Francisco, the William Hodges Fellowship, the Aratoi Fellowship, and the Margaret Stoddart Gallery Residency. Today, her work is held in significant public collections, including the Southland Art Foundation, Pah Homestead in Auckland, and Anderson Park Art Gallery in Invercargill.
For Anita, art has never been simply a profession; it has been a calling. Coming to formal art education later in life as a mother, she has forged a career through determination, curiosity, and an unwavering commitment to her practice. Along the way, art has opened doors to extraordinary experiences, from living and working in Leipzig to travelling through France, journeys that profoundly deepened her understanding of art, history, and culture.
Art also became the education she never found within the traditional classroom. As a neurodivergent child, conventional learning often felt out of reach. Art school, however, offered a place where creativity unlocked a fascination with politics, psychology, literature, history, language, technology, and community. It was an environment where learning felt intuitive, and one that continues to shape her work today.
Anita's figurative oil paintings weave together history, mythology, and contemporary experience, reimagining familiar narratives through a distinctly modern perspective. Using expressive brushwork, layered surfaces, abstraction, and drawing, she creates paintings that speak across time, inviting conversations between the past and the present while encouraging viewers to see both through fresh eyes.
Above Left: Anita DeSoto standing beside one of her large-scale figurative oil paintings. Right: Detail of a figurative oil painting depicting a woman holding a white cat, showcasing the artist's expressive use of colour and layered brushwork.
At the heart of her practice is a fascination with the language of colour, its psychology, universality, and apparent permanence. Through colour, she seeks to create a sense of joie de vivre and transport viewers into other worlds, while also exploring more fragile emotional territories: loss, longing, nostalgia, and dystopian futures.
Again and again, her work returns to what feels most vulnerable and threatened within contemporary capitalist culture: animals, nature, innocence, and the young. These liminal subjects become vessels for tenderness, resistance, and survival. DeSoto is drawn to nostalgia not as sentimentality, but as a phenomenon, a mood, and a strategy of endurance, a way of holding onto our humanity while imagining alternative futures.
Anita warmly invites audiences to the third public art gallery exhibition of POTION 2022 at Ashburton Public Art Gallery, giving an artist talk at the opening on 17 July. POTION is a vibrant homage to the Baroque era, reimagined through the lens of contemporary gender discourse. These large-scale paintings burst with movement, colour, and theatricality, featuring elaborate scenes of flowers, fruit, and groups of women inspired by the mythological narratives of art history. Through these works, DeSoto examines and critiques the historical roles assigned to women, while offering fresh perspectives on the challenges, constraints, and possibilities experienced by women across time.
Above Left: Detail from Anita DeSoto's, Red Potion, 2024, oil on linen. Right: The complete Red Potion oil painting, a large-scale figurative composition inspired by Baroque art and contemporary themes.