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Anja Palombo creates life each and every day. The artist, who specializes in ceramics and painting, recently opened her latest exhibition, Composed at Art Center Sarasota. Palombo hails from Hamburg, Germany, and owns a studio in Sarasota, teaching ceramics to adults. Composed marks Palombo’s first time showing her pottery and painting at the same time. “When I worked full time, I tried to have a show every year and it would alternate between painting or sculpture,” says Palombo. “Before they felt like two separate things but now they are ideas bounding back and forth.”

Palombo’s sculpture and painting are both defined by shapes, a warping of patterns often seen in nature. When visiting her parents in Germany, Palombo says, she does not have access to a ceramics studio—without the pottery wheel, Palombo turns her focus to painting. In Composed, paintings made from dye, acrylic and colored pencil, mirror the structure of her ceramic sculpture. “When you work on the wheel, there’s symmetry because the wheel is round and then you disrupt that symmetry and start bending and warping it which makes things more interesting. Then you cut the piece of clay and have one left over that makes you think, ‘hmm, what I can do with this piece?’” says Palombo. “With painting, I started doing the same thing that I did with ceramics with pieces of paper, cutting shapes and negative spaces from those shapes and juxtaposing them with each other. Then I began to paint the shapes themselves.”

Palombo frequently takes inspiration from mundane objects—the curve of a lampshade, the angle of a table edge—and incorporates them into her sculpture and painting. These universal shapes, Palombo attests, are often those that are most overlooked, yet possess innate beauty. “We live our lives with our heads in computers all day and we fail to see shapes everywhere that are so simple and so outrageous,” says Palombo. “Look at the shadows or the clouds—I even took a tea tray at one point and started to trace it because it looked so cosmic to me.”

Anja Palombo: Composed, May 21-July 31, Artist Talk June 26, Art Center Sarasota, 707 N Tamiami Trail, Sarasota.

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