Anna Constantinou spent her early years in Alexandria, Egypt. In the mid sixties she studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome where she settled and practised as an artist. She has been living in Edinburgh since 1977. Her work reflects a sensibility moulded equally by Leventine and European experience. Rome of the sixties was home to some of the artists of the Arte Povera movement, whose principles inform her work. Minimalist ideologies of the same period have also affected her. A Greek background has influenced the way she sees things: her elegantly balanced pictures reflect the perfect classicism inherent in ancient Hellenic art, while the symbols she uses can be read to refer to both Eastern and Western iconography.
The predominant forms in her work are the circle and the square. These are placed in different combinations on the flat surfaces of her chosen ground, sometimes canvas, other times paper, and sometimes directly on walls. These forms are positioned in varying spatial relationships to the pictorial ground, in configurations which seem to mimic the constant changes time and seasons make to the natural environment, while at the same time aspiring to an orderly formal balance.
Constantinou's art is one of minimal statements, often non-iconographic, and always eloquent, inviting the viewer to form visual associations and references which always expand the significance of her work. Throughout history, the circle and the square have been the two symbols most frequently used in spiritual morphology. Alchemists from about 1000 AD united them as their central symbol of the union of opposites. In Christian art, the circle has various spiritual significations: eternity, infinity, perfection. In mediaeval times, cities were sometimes designed on a circular plan, around a spiritual centre. All these symbolic references come to one's mind when looking at Constantinou's work.
This exhibition is a series of installations, in which the works have been especially created for each of the gallery rooms at Inverleith House.
The extremes of chaos and order, darkness and light, the commonplace and the sublime, are central to Constantinou's work.
Each of the installations forms a synthesis of opposites which creates tensions, contrasts, textures and rhythms. These are achieved with a deliberately limited visual vocabulary, with simplicity and clarity as the primary elements. Constantinou's statements are minimal and often austere.
The artist's palette is also confined. She uses four colours, but with these she achieves passages of great richness. The idea of a limited palette is traced back to antiquity by John Gage in his 'Colour and Culture' of 1993. He writes that, according to Pliny, some of the best artists of the Classical period used four basic colours; these were "white from Milos, Attic yellow, red from Sinope on the Black sea, and the black called atramentum."
White, gold, red and black are the colours Constantinou uses. Her colours are applied to create a pictorial flatness; no brush stroke is evident. When she needs a 'textured' surface this is built up with material, usually gauze rather than paint.
Anna Constantinou's abstract compositions constantly hint at secondary significations. Her quest is for the ideal, the classical, the sublime.
The New York School' of 1973, quotes from one of Longinus's letters: "sublimity consists in a certain excellence and distinction in expression. . . For the effect of elevated language is, not to persuade the hearers, but to entrance them." Constantinou's visual language does just that.
Grazia Gunn, Edinburgh 1995