Julie Baumgardner is an arts and culture writer, editor, and journalist. Her work has been published in Bloomberg, Cultured, the Financial Times, New York Magazine, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.
Inside our bodies micro-signals and currents flow between cells, tissues, and organs. That is to say, they communicate—which is the foundation of the scientific study of bioelectricity. At first glance it might seem like a curious research topic for an abstract painter, whose visual language of choice evades easy definition. Abstraction demands interpretation.
Anastasia Komar transitioned into the medium during the lockdowns era of 2020, alone in the foreign land of New York, where she had moved a few years earlier from her native Kaliningrad, Russia, to work in interior architecture. “I needed to stretch myself,” Komar remembers. “And that’s where the pandemic helped me.”
In a moment of both abstruse reality and molecular horror, when a new virus was invading the human cellular structure, it seems more than coincidence that a recurring instinct occupying Komar’s mind came to be figured out in her sketchbooks. “I don’t have a biological background,” she says; instead, she reached for the intersection of art and science after a degree in architecture and ecology.
Management presentation at Independent, 2024, photo by installshots.art
Anastasia Komar, EDEn I, 2024, courtesy Management
Anastasia Komar, EDEn I (detail), 2024, courtesy Management
Anastasia Komar, EDEn II, 2024, courtesy Management
Anastasia Komar, EDEn II (detail), 2024, courtesy Management
Anastasia Komar, EDEn III, 2024, courtesy Management
Anastasia Komar, EDEn III (detail), 2024, courtesy Management
The confines of the pandemic granted her the opportunity to quiet the hustle of her old routine making art at night on top of a full-time job. World events pushed her into a space where she could finally “disconnect” from the noise and focus on the ideas swirling in her mind. Komar’s process drawings from that time zeroed in on the organic matter of life in intimate detail, echoing Ernst Haeckel’s 19th-century Kunstformen der Natur but without the orderly logic, instead evoking the near-randomness of existence.
Those images pointed the way to Komar’s sculpturally augmented paintings of more recent years, several of which were showcased at striking scale at Independent in 2024 in a solo exhibition by Management. New works—so fresh that Komar isn’t ready to share details yet, save to mention an experimental foray into installation art—are coming to the gallery in downtown New York this spring.
Anastasia Komar in her New York studio. Photo by Gregory Scaffidi, courtesy Management
Working with a slender brush, Komar layers small strokes of acrylic on board with a Pointillist-style technique that gives visual, near material, heft. Cellular structures inform her richly textured fields of color, which she often hears compared to animal fur or hides. Others have linked the hybrid sculptural elements to the work of beloved spider queen Louise Bourgeois, though accessible biomorphism is not what Komar is after.
Of course, there is an inherent connection to living organisms. The paintings come wrapped in “3D printed things,” she quips, that uncannily approximate familiar life forms. These abstractions of snakes, spiders, and foliage feel primordial or post-human, even extraterrestrial. Glass polymer is electroplated to achieve unique finishes: some in chrome, some translucent. (Komar is currently experimenting with bioplastics produced in her kitchen at home, although so far the results haven’t proven strong enough to attach to her boards.)
Anastasia Komar, Cnida, 2022, courtesy Management
Although 3D printing “gives a digital presence to the work,” each sculpture is unique, rooted in a precise “concept made by hand,” as Komar puts it, presenting yet another paradox in the process.
“I do a lot of making notes,” she says of her interests in molecular biology—from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s classic 1917 study On Growth and Form, scientific papers, textbooks and lectures—“and then it kind of reverberates inside.” Translating this research to painting is “not direct, like molecular formulas, but from there the metaphors come.” A clue as to why Komar uses the language of abstraction to communicate.
The individual form of each work arrives organically from Komar’s researching-sketching-painting process. “There’s no straight didactic approach—it comes from the subconscious storage space that you accumulate,” she says. As abstract as they appear, Komar sees the paintings as a “representation of this electromagnetic field” that enables communication within and between living organisms.
Take, for example, Cnida (2022) which references the Chinese scientist He Jiankui, who controversially used a procedure known as CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the DNA of twin baby girls before birth to make them resistant to HIV. Although the work does not narrate this case explicitly, the color palette and rippling motion of the brushstrokes derive from HIV viral cells while the 3D form resembles an octopus or spider enveloping the board in a protective yet creeping gesture. Metaphor is Komar’s way of telling a story.
Anastasia Komar, Plexus II, 2024, courtesy Management
She turns to the biological concept of mutualism to describe the collision between scientific inquiry and artistic practice in her work. It’s “a form of symbiosis where both parties gain advantage from their communication,” she says—think cells interacting in order to enhance their DNA or bacteria living inside a human host. “Communication is so much. It’s everything,” she ventures.
Similarly, Komar sees no contradiction between art and science, only synergy. “My goal may be to translate [scientific data] metaphorically through the work, but also to communicate with people who are doing this research. Because, funny enough, all science comes from concepts, right? And concepts are our work, the artist’s work.”
Mutuality shouldn’t be a foreign concept to our human imaginations, Komar argues, when our bodies are living proof of interdependence. “In biology, we’re not one organism, we’re containers of so many other microorganisms and bacteria.” So in art as in life, “you should not fight it,” she says with a smile. “Find co-existence.”
Julie Baumgardner is an arts and culture writer, editor, and journalist. Her work has been published in Bloomberg, Cultured, the Financial Times, New York Magazine, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.