Anaïs Maar

Anaïs Maar (b. 1993, France) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Paris. Her practice navigates the intimate thresholds between identity, mythology, and the body, creating a universe where personal experience and collective memory converge. Through layered narratives that explore themes such as sexuality, dysphoria, love, violence, and loss, Maar challenges traditional representations of femininity and selfhood with vulnerability, defiance, and poetic force.

Often anchored in recurring self-portraits and hybrid figures, her work unfolds as a form of visual autobiography—simultaneously introspective and mythological. These figures, rendered in lush, vibrant palettes, are caught in cryptic, emotionally charged scenes that resist resolution. They evoke both strength and fragility, joy and unease, inviting viewers into a psychological space charged with symbolic resonance.

Trained in illustration and animation, Maar brings a kinetic energy and graphic sensitivity to her compositions. Her work spans multiple media, including painting, drawing, and large-scale murals, and oscillates between figuration and abstraction, control and chaos. Influences range from Fauvism and Cubism to Russian avant-garde, Japanese graphic culture, and medieval iconography—fused into a singular aesthetic that is both instinctive and highly constructed.

Recurring animal motifs—swans, serpents, lambs, seashells—form a personal and symbolic bestiary. These creatures operate as emotional extensions or alter-egos of the artist, carriers of myth, archetype, and trauma. They imbue her practice with a sacred, almost ritualistic dimension, exploring transformation, protection, seduction, and surrender.

For Maar, painting is both eruption and meditation—an elemental, bodily act she likens to the Mediterranean Sea: at once tranquil and violent, lyrical and raw. Her canvases pulse with urgency, weaving personal and archetypal stories into a visual language that is visceral, complex, and deeply human.