Artist profile
Anne-Rita
Vleugel
Anne-Rita Vleugel is an emerging Australian oil painter. She paints expressive, contemporary abstracts inspired by the feelings generated by wild landscapes.
Using predominantly warm, earthy tones, Anne-Rita creates rich, organic works that capture a sense of depth and calm while exploring the tension between dualities such as enduring and fragility.
Largely self-taught, Anne-Rita has benefited from the generosity of many artists.
Currently a resident artist at 106 Art: Studios and Gallery in St Kilda, Anne-Rita’s original works have been acquired by collectors and designers across Australia.
Artist Career Highlights
- 2026 Larapuna, Brunswick Street Gallery, Fitzroy (solo exhibition)
- 2025 Small, fortyfive downstairs, Melbourne
Artist Interview
How does your artwork get from initial concept to exhibition stage?
My practice is grounded in abstraction and intuitive process, shaped through extended time immersed in wild landscapes. Surfaces are built up with thick impasto in some areas and dry lines in others, revealing traces of process and time, the enduring and the fragility. Gestural marks interact with quiet passages of negative space Paint is built, disrupted and reworked over time, allowing each piece to arrive at its own resolution. Intuitive mark making, layered surfaces, texture and line all in earthy pigments are common threads to my works. Paintings are created from my studio allowing each painting to evolve through process rather than planning. My preference is to create a series of works. The painting is not of a landscape, but of the experience of feelings that arise when within it.
Tell us a bit about your story and how you came to be an artist
My first visit to Central Australia in the late 1990s first created the spark of awe, and a strong desire to capture with paint, the feeling of being in that landscape. It was decades later that life changes provided the time to spend several years on self-directed education and gaining the necessary brush miles to develop skills. Since 2020 I have been a full time artist.
How would you describe your creative process?
