Anastasia Pather is concerned with surface, gender and value and enjoys the ambiguity of double meanings and innuendo.

Born in 1987, she is yet to understand the formulaic act of an artist biography as anything other than proving you should be liked because someone has previously liked you. That being said, in 2020 Anastasia was selected by the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden for a residency in Marrakech. In 2018 she was selected for the OpenLab Residency in Richmond, Northern Cape and named by the Project Space as a finalist for the Young Female Residency Award and one of the top twenty artists of Joburg Art Fair, 2018. Pather has also been a semi-finalist for the SA TAXI Foundation Art Award. Anastasia paints in Johannesburg and has had three solo shows at 99 Loop, Cape Town (2016, 2017, 2018).

“I am an artist, finger painter and female concerned with the surface and the perceived. My painting process is intuitive. It relies on what my fingers remember and what the paint and surface reveal. I am fascinated by the idea of muscle memory: procedural memories the body stores as a subconscious response. I often wonder if the body holds generational muscle memory and what power or strain this extends to children of migration, inheritors of diasporic connections to the sea because of colonisers with ships. My body of work considers the shifting power dynamic between nature, culture and gender and how this affects the surface and what is ‘actual’ versus what is remembered or perceived. The works explore imagined landscapes in the natural, cyber and material world.” - Anastasia Pather