Austrian artist Anouk Lamm Anouk is brave, talented, and utterly unique. Working in their studio in Vienna, Austria, Anouk employs a variety of mediums - sculpture, painting, drawings, and verse – to explore painful periods in their life with forthright honesty. They invite the viewer in to share in the two most profound issues they have battled in their adult life; a 2003 diagnosis with autism - a neurological and behavioral disorder that can cause the sufferer to endure psychically agonizing feelings of isolation and emotional dislocation – and their concurrent internal battle regarding gender and gender identity.

Educated at The Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and The University of Arts, Berlin, Anouk’s canon of work is summarized by her manifesto: “no age no gender no origin.” Anouk’s figures, drawn in delicate lines, were applied with thin applications acrylic on linen, a technique that added to their elusive androgyny. Anouk also pairs her visual art with short, cathartic free-verse fragments, such as: “/turn once, stand once, just keep walking.../” and “blindfolded for the continuing form of existence …”

Anouk’s choice to compare their visual style to “Jazz” music also underlines their understanding that their improvisational style is what makes it unique and alluring. In jazz, particularly Be-Bop, each unique “riff” or repetition of a phrase echoes a previous phrase yet differs slightly. This process of “circling” invites one to participate in the exciting process of creation.

If one compares Anouk’s visual style to the genius of improvisational jazz saxophonist Charlie “The Bird” Parker, one immediately understands the analogy. Parker, whose musical style is defined as: “complex chord progressions with rapid chord changes and numerous changes of key, instrumental virtuosity, and improvisation based on a combination of harmonic structure, and the use of scales and occasional references to the melody” – one could easily transpose it to Anouk’s paintings.  One feels that If Parker were able to view Anouk’s work, he would immediately and intuitively understand that their improvisational “lyric phrasing” distinguishes them from other artists, for whom more potent, semiotic punctuation marks of completion are necessary.