ANNA SIDANA: Sentient Colorations
March 6 - April 12, 2025
Artist Reception: Thursday, March 6, 5-7 PM
CULT Aimee Friberg is pleased to present Anna Sidana: Sentient Colorations, an exhibition of new oil paintings opening March 6 and running through April 12, 2025. Sentient Colorations marks the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery with an opening reception on Thursday, March 6, from 5 to 7 PM.
Anna Sidana makes fecund, immersive paintings that are rich in color and allegory. In Sentient Colorations, she reflects on cultural assimilation, and the challenges of being an immigrant, a mother, and a woman of color. Depicting a lush bramble of blooms, and thorns, Sidana invites the viewer to swim in an emotive wash of color and alluring forms.
After a robust career working in technology and raising her children as a solo parent, Sidana came to painting in her fifth decade of life, as a way to re-engage her senses and find more fulfillment in daily experience. Themes of metamorphosis, hydration, temporal shifts, growth, and decay, are suggested in the theatrical scenes of robust flora against a deep blue sky. In recent years, Sidana has drawn from her childhood memories of playing hide-and-seek in the mango orchards amongst peacocks and running free in the cotton fields at her family farm in Rajasthan, India. These recollections offer an enchanting opportunity for fantasy, against the backdrop of life’s harsh realities. As the work titles suggest, such as Soft Landing, Metamorphosis I and II, Reminiscences, and Entanglements, Sidana is sifting through and pondering her formative experiences of life as an immigrant, and her journey of assimilation. It’s with this desire to honor and connect with her Indian heritage that she asks the question that everyone who’s left one's home to build another can relate to: "What do you keep from your own culture and what do you leave behind?" She explains, "I’m drawn to a nostalgic use of these bright deep colors that connect me to my Indian origins, and honor that legacy."
Anna Sidana (b. 1960, New Delhi) makes immersive oil paintings exploring the emotional connection between her familial history and heritage. Completing her MFA in one of the last matriculating classes of the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) in 2020, Sidana has shown broadly in the Bay Area. Her work has been exhibited at the de Young Museum of San Francisco, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, the Diego Rivera Gallery at SFAI, the San Francisco Civic Center, and the San Francisco Art Institute at Fort Mason, among other locations. In addition, her work has been exhibited in Times Square, New York, at the Venice Architectural Biennale in Venice, Italy, and the London Art Biennale in the UK. Sidana has served on the boards of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and ZERO1 and is currently on the board at the San Francisco Art Institute Legacy Foundation and Archive. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the British Computer Society (BCS) and currently resides in San Francisco, California.
