After having practised art in parallel with her marketing career, Anne decided to fully dedicate herself to art in 2003. She retrained and specialised in painting at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts de Paris-Glacière. After moving to London, she discovered printmaking at Central Saint Martin (2007-2008), and decided to refocus her work on this highly demanding and technical medium.

Anne Gournay finds inspiration in her passion for charcoal drawing, and photography. “I am drawn to highly contrasted and textured images, and look for structure and patterns in the world around me. I work from my photographs, using my camera and my imagination as a sketchbook. I have a precise idea in my mind of what I’m aiming for, and use various printmaking techniques, sometimes combining them, to achieve the desired result. My training at Central St Martin has enabled me to learn how to use softwares like photoshop, which open a lot of possibilities for a printmaker. I really enjoy combining various techniques, trying out new ones, but also mixing a traditional and a more ‘high tech’ approach to image making.”

Anne’s work is frequently inspired by nature, in an attempt to reconnect our modern selves with our roots, and questions the temporality of our existence. One of Anne’s recent series of work, Lepidoptera, evokes the Victorian tradition of collecting butterflies, to capture their beauty, but just by its process (pinning the butterfly onto the paper), is a perfect expression of life’s fragility and evanescence. It got selected for the show “Making Impressions”, at the Watts Gallery, alongside work by some of the foremost printmakers of today. Her close-up screenprints of flowers at full blom combine a very graphic expression with a strong focus on colours and textures, with the use of raw pigments, portraying the beauty of the flower, just before it starts to wither.

She lives and works in North-West London. In 2016, she set up ContemporArti, an artist-run gallery with a strong focus on Limited Edition. Her work is in private collections worldwide, and is part of the V&A collection fund, and the Scarborough Museum trust.