Anki King has spent decades circling the human figure, worrying it the way weather worries stone. “Then and Now,” her upcoming exhibition at The Lace Mill in Kingston (March 7-29), brings together more than a decade of that looking and re-looking, spanning paintings, drawings, and—new to this scale in her practice—a substantial group of ceramic sculptures. The show occupies both the Main and West Galleries, giving the work room to breathe, echo, and occasionally stare back.
King’s figures arrive stripped of biography. Faces blur, disappear, or turn away. Bodies bend, hang, press together, or hold themselves apart. The palette stays close to bone and ash—blacks, whites, silvers, with color rationed like a scarce resource. When it appears, it matters. The effect is physical and psychological at once: paint dragged, scraped, and layered into surfaces that feel worked over, as if the image was earned through friction.
The paintings anchor the exhibition. In works like the suspended figure of Hang or the paired bodies of Back to Back II, King explores balance and strain, connection and refusal. The figures read as archetypes—stand-ins for states of mind—caught in moments that feel paused mid-thought. Motion hums beneath the stillness. You sense muscles tightening, weight shifting, breath held.
That tension carries into the ceramics. Small heads and figurative forms, rendered in clay and laced with thread or restrained glazes, translate King’s concerns into three dimensions. Their modest scale pulls viewers close. These are objects that ask for intimacy, for inspection at human distance, where surface decisions and small disruptions register clearly.
Though King has lived and worked in New York City for three decades, the work remains tethered to a Scandinavian emotional ecosystem shared with painter Edvard Munch and writer Knut Hamsun: interiors charged with anxiety, solitude as a condition rather than a mood, and figures caught in private reckonings that unfold against an indifferent natural world. (I dare anyone to read Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil and not viscerally feel the world’s indifference.)
“Then and Now” reads as both a survey and a tightening of focus. Across media, King returns to the body as a universal container for inner life. The result is an exhibition that feels cohesive, grounded, and unafraid of emotional weight.
“Anki King: Then and Now” will be exhibited at the Lace Mill in Kingston March 7-29. An opening reception will be held on March 7 from 5-8pm.
