Adelaide’s Anna Gore leaves it up to her audience to find their own meanings in her grand scale paintings.

Grand scale, dynamic compositions and a moody palette mark the works of Anna Gore, a lecturer and 2013 graduate of Adelaide Central School of Art (ACSA).

Her latest exhibit, Crust, was curated by ACSA curator Andrew Purvis and opened by Christian Lock, another significant local artist. Andrew says Anna’s work is important.

“What Anna represents is a legacy of genealogy within the South Australian arts community of very strong painters,” Andrew says.

“She sits at the nexus of these generational influences, adapting a lot of what she’s learned from each artist, but producing something that’s wholly new, innovative and very representative of her own unique imagination.

“Certainly, within this scene, there’s not many artists who are doing what Anna is doing. But I think that she also is a figure who is quite important for where we are at the moment.”

Anna was previously mentored by esteemed local artist Aldo Iacobelli. It’s rather neat then that her exhibition came straight after Aldo’s own showing at ACSA, The Book of Questions, which ended in May.

The title Crust speaks to the idea of surfaces heavy with an accumulated, tough outer layer. The four major canvases – each around four to six metres long – remain intentionally fluid, layered works in progress that Anna has regularly returned to over the last four years.

She describes the collection of paintings and the objects in them as somewhat enigmatic. “I feel they sit between a range of meanings and visually they come in and out of clarity and out of view,” she explains.

Some of this is a consequence of their size.

“It’s such a challenge physically and visually to do something on such a large scale,” explains Anna. “When you’re standing at arm’s length from the canvas to work on it, you can never really see what is going on in the other parts. So, you never get an ongoing, big picture perspective of the work.”

Anna’s mentorship with Aldo, initially via Guildhouse’s Catapult program, was in support of a 10-metre canvas she was working on at the time.

“That was the first of my very large, unstretched paintings in this more ambitious resolved finish,” she says. “Some other paintings, including ones that are now on exhibition in Crust, were in their infant stage at that time.”

Andrew, who has previously curated Anna’s work, approached her again this year after architectural changes to ACSA’s gallery space meant it could accommodate her paintings, which he rightly calls “monumental”.

While working on them, Anna was also painting smaller pieces, studies and what she calls “spin off works”, and these are included in the exhibition.

In returning to ACSA as a lecturer, she says there’s a lot of responsibility in nurturing the next wave of artists. “Most of what I do is geared toward helping people figure out what they want to say and what is important to them as an artist.”

For her own work, she says her intention is possibly the opposite.

“I want the paintings to feel a little bit mysterious,” she says.

Read the exhibition essay by Lily Trnovsky here.