Ganster is best known for her paintings that explore the ground between the experience of viewing and painting. She concentrates on the moment which provokes a decision to paint, be it a sensation produced by a situation as simple as the reflection of light on a wall or through blinds in the morning, or a response to a certain place, such as the feeling experienced by walking through an empty corridor.

In her latest series of paintings, as has been the case for the last ten years, place remains the starting point for her work and in it we find personal, deeply touching references to her immediate private environment alongside images of decidedly more public spaces such as a shop or restaurant interior. Drenched in vivid light, these images are painted with an urgency that begs the viewer to look more carefully at the spaces regularly passed through unthinkingly and without contemplation.

Other landscapes are blurred, indistinct visions, as if seen from a moving car or in pouring rain. Painted in an earthy palette of slate blues, greens and taupe, the canvas splashed with turps, they represent what she does best in this medium. Any figurative characteristics seem as melting or transitory versions of events and the paintings demand an abstract reading whilst they play with the tensions between pure abstraction and representation.

Anja Ganster is based in London but divides her time between London and Basel. She is a graduate of the Art Academy, Mainz and the Slade School of Art, London. She was a finalist of the recent Sovereign European Art Prize (2006) and is a previous winner of the prestigious Joyce West Scholarship (2005). Since Ganster’s first show in Mainz in 1994 she has shown extensively in Europe, USA and Australia and, in addition to her current project in Basel, has held residencies in Mallorca, Melbourne and Paris. Her paintings are in numerous prestigious collections including that of the Museum Frieder Burda.