Anika De Souza

About

London-based painter working in acrylic, graphite, oil stick and dry media, Anika De Souza builds layered surfaces where language dissolves into gesture and trace.

Statement

My paintings evolve through layered washes, gestural mark-making and fragments of writing that are repeatedly embedded and obscured. Language gradually becomes gesture, and the surface holds traces of thought, movement and time. Each work builds through accumulation rather than a fixed narrative – meaning comes from how material, colour and trace sit together, not from a story being told. My practice moves between found text, spontaneously written words and asemic writing. Some texts are excavated from existing material through removal, while others arise directly in the act of painting before disappearing beneath subsequent layers. Across both, language shifts from something that is read to something experienced as material trace. The empty spaces – Leerräume – are as active as the marks themselves. They create room for hesitation, emergence and change, allowing each painting to remain open rather than resolved.

Exhibitions

Commissions

I take commissions for larger work.

Starting from $5,080