Anika De Souza is a London-based abstract mixed media artist originally from Germany. With a background in graphic design and over a decade in the advertising industry, her practice centres on painting as a form of material and spatial inquiry.
Working with acrylic, graphite, oil stick, and dry media, De Souza builds layered compositions through mark-making that holds both discipline and instinct in tension. Central to her practice is a cut-out text technique — harvesting fragments from existing texts and embedding them within the painted surface to create concealed narrative elements. Language here is treated as material rather than message, dissolving into rhythm, texture, and spatial tension.
Her work explores the balance between articulation and silence, presence and absence, allowing space to function as an active element within the composition. She lives and works in Kingston Upon Thames.
De Souza has exhibited at The Other Art Fair, The Affordable Art Fair, Kingston Open Artist Studios, The Circle Gallery, and TAP Gallery (Turner Art Perspective Gallery), and her work has been featured in Times and Leisure.
— Explore the work
Artist Statement
"My practice investigates the interplay between language, material, and space. Drawing on my background in graphic design and calligraphy, I approach writing as a physical act, using gestural marks and structural forms to explore rhythm, movement, and texture. For me, language becomes material: I harvest fragments of text through a cut-out technique and embed them within layered compositions, where words stretch, blur, and fragment into abstraction.
This process shifts my focus from legibility to form, gesture, and spatial tension. My marks oscillate between control and spontaneity, while moments of absence – die Leerräume – function as active space, allowing the composition to breathe. Through this dialogue of presence and absence, accumulation and restraint, I invite the viewer to engage beyond language and experience the energy of gesture and the materiality of the surface.
I build my surfaces by combining expansive stains, layered media, and spontaneous marks with intentional interruptions, erasures, and voids. The result is a dynamic tension between order and disruption, structure and collapse. My work resists polished resolution, sustaining a restless dialogue in which rhythm, material, and space operate as both subject and medium."
