Anne Sherwood Pundyk’s abstract paintings are crafted from the very mechanics of concealment — canvas cropped, stained, stitched, buried under paint, and partially surfaced. Her work focuses less on relaying what is hidden and more on the unfolding and inner-wrestling of hiding itself.

Anne’s work is rooted in generational trauma — but trauma that was never openly addressed. She inherited not just the weight of what happened but the patterns of secrecy surrounding it: watchfulness, coded communication, the instinct to conceal. Her practice focuses less on the content of what was hidden than on the ingrained mechanisms of hiding itself. What shapes her work is the architecture of concealment — built around things left unspoken.

This absence of open discourse is what gives her work its particular power. Rather than address the source directly, she confronts the mechanisms — the ingrained habits of concealment that shaped how she moves through the world. She works from the body first — responding before interpreting, letting meaning surface through action rather than directing it from above. Her studio practice becomes a space to disassemble those mechanisms, using the very materials of the domestic environment where the hiding took place: utility canvas, hardware store paint, sewing machine, scissors.

The forms in her paintings make this wrestling visible. Geometric scaffolding — grids, hard-edged blocks of red and blue, dense crosshatched fields — impose order and containment. Sweeping circles of brilliant color — arcs of white, floods of yellow and green, drips and spills — push against and through them. The tension between the two is the tension between vigilance and release, control and overflow. Her unstretched canvases, stitched together from cropped sections with threads left dangling and seams exposed, become bodies held together by their own repairs.

This intimate reckoning carries broader resonance. As curator Helen A. Harrison has observed, Anne’s work “suggests that understanding requires another interpretive tool, or perhaps a personal surrender to a deeper, less accessible, level of cognition.” The dynamics she navigates — enforced silence, buried truths surfacing through layered process, the slow work of making the invisible visible — mirror the dynamics any society faces when confronting what it has chosen to conceal. Her work models a posture of self-directed inquiry, inviting the viewer to sit inside the structures of concealment and discover meaning for themselves.

And yet a paradox runs through her practice: freedom is found not by escaping concealment but by inhabiting it. Anne’s artistic life itself began this way, through a grandmother who — an artist herself — carved out space for expression simply by drawing in Anne’s presence, modeling creative freedom from within the very system of family silence. Concealment contained its own antidote. Recently, however, Anne’s work has begun to push against this paradox. Her expertise navigating hidden realms now allows her to choose for herself what she wants to hide and what she wants to say. Her recent suite of monoprints unveil arched dispatches, her new daily ink drawings ask a blunt question — “How do I feel today?” — and her latest paintings embrace accident and excess with a new organizing principle: track mud on the rug. After a lifetime of learning the craft of hiding, she is testing what it means to choose, deliberately, to reveal.

                                                                                                                                                      —  Dylan Greif, 2026