Anne Collier USA, b. 1970

Anne Collier has been recognized internationally for her complex body of work that considers our social and cultural relationships with images and with the medium of photography itself. Central to this project is Collier’s ongoing consideration of the emotional and psychological attachments we develop with images, and how these (auto)biographical narratives relate to photography’s inherent relationship with memory, melancholia and loss.

Collier’s Filter works expand upon her long-standing consideration of the analog photographic process and the mechanics at play in the production, construction and distribution of images. Her recent works are based around imagery sourced from vintage American romance comic books from 1950s to 1980s. Collier exclusively focuses on the comic books’ clichéd narratives paradoxically served to reinforce the notion of a subservient and eternally suffering female subject. The image is placed in a new context through the process of enlarging, cutting, using filter and framing. Throughout her work Collier seeks to privilege the relationship between gender and image-making, whilst simultaneously maintaining a tension between the ’objective’, almost forensic-like depiction of her subjects and the often fraught and highly emotive nature of the images and objects that she re-presents.

Anne Collier currently lives and works in New York. She received a BFA from CalArts, Valencia, in 1993, and an MFA from UCLA, Los Angeles, in 2001. Collier’s work was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover (2018), that traveled to Fotomuseum Winterthur (2019). Other recent solo museum exhibitions include: FRAC Normandie, Rouen (2017); and a major survey organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2014), which traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2014); the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2015), and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2016). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the USA, Tate Collection in the UK, Centre Georges Pompidou, FRAC Normandie Rouen in France, Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland and Moderna Museet in Sweden.