Ana Ksamit


Ana studied first humanities. Art, literature. She worked for many years as an English second language teacher. She got attracted to geometric abstraction by frequenting a circle of friends. Abstract painters. She began drawing, experimenting herself and finally studied painting. She says, she rediscovered herself, her alter ego.
She is a Polish by soul and temper. Raised on the Upper East Side in a Jewish family from Central Europe, she never liked this part of the city, nor the deep dissonances between her parents. As soon as she could she moved out and rented a small studio in Chelsea. The only thing she took from home, she says, is the love of knitting. Her grandmother used to knit for the whole family, and while occupied with it she would tell Ana stories from the past with her thick slavic accent. Stories from the other side of the ocean.


Ana is very independent and private. She doesn’t want her works to be labeled, categorized. She has her own group of followers and shows her work internationally but in a restrained way.

Ana can be almost ascetic in her artistic expression, confining to a certain decorative minimalism. Adequat, she says. But sometimes she is surprisingly dashing and daring, sumptuous and showy. “Like my baba’s knitting”, she says.