Hello.
I’m Anja Columbres — a self-taught artist with an open mind, a global outlook, and a love for design, Mid-Century aesthetics, Wabi-Sabi, and clean, considered forms.
My creative world draws inspiration from many different places: photography, travel, architecture, design, and a curiosity for exploring new materials and techniques.
At the heart of my practice is acrylic on wood — a medium I’ve been working with for years, continually discovering new ways to express myself through it.
Without a formal art education, but with a broad interdisciplinary background and an openness to all things inspiring, I’ve developed a visual language of my own. Over the years, my work has become increasingly minimal, reduced, and abstract.
I’m drawn to the essential. To the interplay of form, color, and space. And to the art of saying more with less.
Visual Poems.
I call my artworks visual poems rather than paintings. Like surreal lyrics, they invite multiple interpretations rather than convey a single, fixed meaning.
In my visual poems, I explore universal human emotions, states of mind, hopes and anxieties, expressing them through natural phenomena, wildlife, nature and anatomy. My imagery combines familiar elements of reality — fragments of the human body, insects or crystals — with unnatural, alienated environments. The result is a world that feels both familiar and strangely surreal.
Although creativity is central to my practice, I am equally drawn to structure and order. This duality is reflected in my work, where surreal imagery meets geometric shapes and carefully constructed forms.
Many of my visual poems are contemporary interpretations of the Memento Mori theme, reflecting on the transience of earthly life and the ever-present awareness of death as an integral part of existence. While they carry a certain darkness, they also open up bright, colourful worlds that ultimately embrace a life-affirming spirit.
Influences.
I find it really hard to name specific influences to my work, but I will nevertheless give it a try. As a pop-surrealist I am of course influenced by the big surrealists of the 20th century like Salvador Dali, Max Ernst or Frida Kahlo. Although there are heaps of contemporary visual artists that I find highly fascinating and who’s work I do like a lot (Camille Rose Garcia, Amy Judd or Jacky Tsai just to name a few), most of my inspirations do not arise from visual arts at all. I am blissed to find inspiration in the lyrics of Country or Folk Rock, in surreal European movies, in modern American and classic Russian literature, in minimalistic Scandinavian design, in b/w photography and in theatre plays I visit here in Munich and on the road.