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While some of her drawings involve pencil and paper, many of them are unbound from the confines of the page and exist as embroideries, sewn leather, bleached fabric, and even objects. For Jotta, to draw is to draw out — in the sense of demonstrating, discovering, or fleshing out the potential connections that lie dormant between disparate images and references. In her hands, to draw is also to draw from — to take, to appropriate, and to extract from the world. And yet even the simple act of drawing a line, in its most basic sense, is about creating links and forging associations and serves as an apt metaphor for her process more generally. The artist expands the language of drawing by inventing a field where sketches, stitches, scribbles, silhouettes, scratches, and scissors contribute to an ecosystem of overlapping gestures. They mirror her approach as an artist and embody her disregard for the categories and boundaries that traditionally separate aesthetic registers — including the line between art and life.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ana Jotta (b.1946, Lisbon) has built a body of work that challenges notions of authorship and that obscures the line between art and life. From the late 1970s until the late 1980s, she worked in theatre both as an actress and costume and stage designer. On the side, she started her practice as an artist working across all media. She has had monographic exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich (2024), Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2023), Casa São Roque - Centro de Arte, Porto (2019), Temporary Gallery, Cologne (2018), Établissement d’en face, Brussels (2016), Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine (2016), and Culturgest, Porto (2016). A first retrospective of her work was presented at the Serralves Museum in Porto in 2005 and a second one at Culturgest, in Lisbon, in 2014. She lives and works in Lisbon.