ANNE LINDBERG
seen and unseen

17 May 2025 - late 2026
curated by Lee Glazer

Artist Anne Lindberg presents an immersive sculpture and four drawings in her solo exhibition, seen and unseen, for this year’s Visiting Artist Series in the Atrium Space at the Academy Art Museum.

Tucked into the two-story space at the north end of the atrium, a luminous cloud of floating color shifts upwards from the first floor to the second floor. Curiosity plays an important role in the viewing of this work, as the entire piece is difficult to “see” all at once within the surrounding architecture, ceiling, railing and windows. Lindberg is interested in the ways that sculpture can interact with architectural space, the body and viewpoints. seen and unseen plays spatial, perceptual and conceptual hide and seek with views within the museum.

Lindberg has cast fine chromatic threads between the east and west walls at the north end of the atrium. Using staple attachments, the vibrating and slowly changing gradient of color from cool to warm, at the first to second floor regions, connects with the landscape of the eastern shore. Adjacent to the sculpture are two large and two smaller graphite and colored pencil drawings. Again, parallel lines build the matrix of the image. She similarly investigates variations in color temperature in the drawings, with zips of strong chroma activating the fluid fields of color.

For over 40 years, Lindberg has been working within broad definitions of sculpture, drawing, and textiles in multiple dimensions. While all her work is abstract, embedded within its formal and material languages are concerns of time, sequence, and causality, and a drive to speak about what is private, vulnerable, fragile, and perceptive of the human condition. 

As a woman artist, Lindberg creates work that challenges the long-held associations abstraction has had with male artists. Abstraction is re-dressed from a feminist perspective in delicate materials with luminous color, repetition, and an ethereal quality of light. Color sits at the forefront of her work where it has the power to elicit visceral responses to the profound and disquieting present in which we all live.

Lindberg understands her studio as a paced and daily conversation with place, manifesting and mirroring how she negotiates physicality, optics, and ideas. Each color or line is simultaneously an action and a response, a moment, a thought, a leap of faith. For her, making is a form of travel – across and within space toward a condition of luminosity. Her sculptural work unfolds at the pace of each step, as she and her assistant cast threads between walls while walking. Walking encourages a fluid state of perceptions and affects change as it informs moment-to-moment decisions in the making of the work.

“My installations and two-dimensional drawings on mat board address color as a powerful expression of the subconscious, the spiritual, the physiological, and the optical,” Lindberg notes. “The installations are essentially stitched into the architecture, and built with color, light, and air, filament by filament through space.”