Born in Odessa, Russia in 1905 to an affluent family, Anya Fisher demonstrated her first artistic gifts as a pianist when she was just five years old. Shortly after the Bolsheviks killed her father in 1917, her mother fled with this gifted artist and her two sisters to America. After a short career with the Minneapolis Symphony and a brief marriage, she moved to San Francisco and met the love of her life, Eddie Fisher. The two married and made their way to Los Angeles, where she painted and worked at LACMA to fund two years of study at the Academie Grand Chaumiere in Paris. When she returned, she enrolled in classes with Rico Lebrun at the Jepson Art Institute. She graduated with honors in 1951.
Combining elements of mysticism and her advanced feminist sensibility with the aesthetics of West Coast modernism and references to Russian Orthodox icons, Fisher developed a unique visual language with which to express her interest in line, color and volume. Her figurative work concentrates exclusively on women - a reflection of her feminist convictions. In these paintings, women radiate the polarities of power and tenderness. Her women exist, not as objects of the male gaze, but as incarnations of the sublime creative force which so drove the artist throughout her career. Her still lifes and her landscapes, likewise, defy convention and invoke the metaphysical. These paintings exhibit the artist’s fascination with the crystalline structures of geodes and her interest in the emerging Hard Edge school in Los Angeles. In 1992, Anya Fisher died in Pasadena, California, leaving behind a substantial body of paintings and drawings.
