Anita DeSoto

Anita DeSoto is an Ōtepoti/Dunedin artist with 25 years’ experience exhibiting nationally and internationally. She holds a Master of Fine Arts and taught Drawing and Painting at the Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic since 2004-2024. DeSoto has received major residencies and fellowships, including the Leipzig International Art Program (Germany), Aratoi Fellowship, New Pacific Studios (San Francisco), William Hodges Fellowship and the Margaret Stoddart Gallery residency. Her work is held in public collections including the Southland Art Foundation, Pah Homestead, Auckland, and Anderson Park Public Gallery, Invercargill.
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” — Asami Nakamiri
I travel through history in my figurative oil paintings, reinterpreting narrative and empowering my figures through acts of reimagining. Expressive paint, layering, abstraction, and line drawing become ways of speaking across time. At the centre of my practice is a passion for the language of colour — its psychology, universality, and seeming permanence. Through colour I seek to create a joie de vivre, an escape into another world, while also exploring more fragile emotional territories: loss, longing, nostalgia, and dystopian futures. Again and again, my work returns to what feels most vulnerable and threatened within contemporary capitalist culture: animals, nature, innocence, and the young. These liminal subjects become vessels for tenderness, resistance, and survival. I am drawn to nostalgia not as sentiment, but as a phenomenon, a mood, and a means of endurance — a way of holding onto humanity while imagining other possible futures.