Anastasya Peña

Anastasya Peña (b. 1996) is an abstract, color–based painter, born and raised in New York City. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019 and is a graduate from the MFA at Hunter College. She was included in Persona (2025), Contents May Vary (2025), and Roller Rink (2026) at Fredericks & Freiser. Mood Ring (2026) is her first solo show in New York. 

Peña’s paintings and materials never surrender their identities. Beginning with poured acrylic, she establishes the painting's initial form. She then creates meticulous passages of oil that echo, extend, and occasionally depart from the original pour, responding to its contours through a distinctly different painterly approach. In many paintings, glossy passages of acrylic medium—and the occasional concentrated bursts of thick undiluted paint—further complicate the relationship between what has been poured and what has been painted.

Peña embeds psychology in the behavior of her paintings. Color, beauty, adornment, concealment, and repeated echoes of earlier gestures give the paintings an unexpected pathos. A poured form is answered, embellished, obscured, or exposed, with subsequent interventions functioning almost as footnotes to what came before. The paintings are unabashedly seductive, but their beauty is never passive. Peña uses abstraction to explore concerns more often associated with contemporary figuration: exposure and concealment, control and desire, and the complicated act of making oneself visible.