Anastasia Bay lives and works in Brussels. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris in 2012. Bay’s practice revolves around a contemporary investigation of the human figure, positioned between figuration and abstraction. Through large scale compositions and a deliberately reduced visual vocabulary, she constructs a distinctive pictorial language in which seemingly simple lines carry a strong emotional intensity.
Her work draws from a wide range of references, spanning art history, particularly medieval and Renaissance painting, as well as popular culture, comics, and literature. This layered approach produces ambiguous scenes where bodies appear fragmented or suspended in unresolved actions, dissolving linear narratives and shifting the focus toward presence, gesture, and tension.
Executed in a characteristic combination of pastel, acrylic, and oil, her paintings rely on the interplay between flat color fields and dynamic contours, generating a sense of movement and visual instability. The figures, often anonymous and at times unsettling, engage with questions of identity, corporeality, and contemporary modes of representation. Since emerging on the European art scene, Bay has exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions across major international contexts, including Paris, Brussels, New York, and Beijing. Her work is held in significant public and private collections worldwide.
