Stations of the Cross
Audrey Anastasi 03.17.2025 - 06.13.2025 Narthex Gallery
About The Exhibition
The Arts and Architecture Conservancy at Saint Peter’s presents Stations of the Cross by Audrey Anastasi, on view in the Narthex Gallery, in collaboration with Saint Peter’s Church, from Friday, March 14 to Friday, June 13, 2025.
The Passion, a story and artistic subject so central to the Christian tradition, is one countlessly retold and reimagined over millennia. In this Stations of the Cross series by Brooklyn-based artist Audrey Anastasi, the work invites new perspectives and rewards close-looking.
“As long as I remember visiting churches, I’ve been transfixed viewing the Stations of the Cross. I was compelled to join the great tradition of artists who have put their interpretation into physical form,” Anastasi said. “Having these works be part of the Lenten devotions was a profoundly moving experience for me.”
The material of the paintings echoes the narrative themes of humility and glory, as each holy scene is contained within a 12 inch square, with a gold-leafed canvas and simple, flat abstraction in black acrylic gesso. The gold-leaf brings the scenes alive with light, reflecting and changing throughout the viewer’s encounter with the artwork. Much of the detail and content suggested by the brushwork arose by chance—the series was an intuitive, spontaneous process, with the images flowing quickly and directly, without premeditation and without reference to sketches or photos.
“It was not my conscious intention to depict, for example, Mary with rosary beads in Station IV, or to represent Simon with a halo in Station V, or to show the red pigment beneath the gold leaf, which appears as blood on Jesus’ scraped shoulder in Station IX,” Anastasi said.
Painting with her non-dominant hand, Anastasi allows the artistic vision to emerge with an organic informality, one that honors the natural, human response to the Passion of Christ.
About The Artist
Audrey Frank Anastasi is an artist working in painting, drawing, collage, mixed media, and printmaking. She is also a curator, gallerist, educator and arts advocate. Anastasi has an extensive history of 20 solo and approximately 200 group exhibitions, and her work is in numerous private and public collections.
Her original “ref-u-gee” series of 180 paintings on the theme of forced migration was shown in solo exhibitions at the Valentine Museum of Art (VMoA) and the Brooklyn College library gallery. A 440 page monograph with over 180 images and a foreword by Phyllis Braff was published in an edition, limited to 250 signed and certified copies.
In addition to humanistic subjects like forced migration and spiritual themes such as the Stations of the Cross, she creates feminist paintings, as well as nature images of birds, animals, and birch trees. Since 1990, most of her figurative works have been painted with her non-dominant left-hand.
In 2005, with her husband, Joseph Anastasi, she founded Tabla Rasa Gallery in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Audrey continues to serve on the Board of Directors of the Brooklyn Arts Council and Hook Arts Media, formerly Dance Theatre Etcetera. She is also President Emeritus of Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition
