Artist Statement
Layered and figurative, my work portrays an ambiguous space where inner and outer worlds merge.
My process weaves subconscious intuition with observation, tracing dreams and unspoken thoughts through small human gestures. Each painting holds multiple readings, revealed slowly over time. My art is less about inventing magic than revealing how it already inhabits the familiar.
Focused on light, gesture, and texture, I take joy in the messy alchemy of oil paint and the ancient rootedness of charcoal. Drawing from Australian fauna and flora, these works become quiet sanctuaries where the eye can rest and the mind can wander.
Artist Bio
Anna-Carien Goosen is a Sydney-based artist. She developed her addiction to secretly sketching strangers while studying art in Pretoria, where she bagged a handsome ginger giant who doubles as her Art Fair pack mule. Together they live on the edge of bushland with three boisterous boys and a menagerie of wildlife scratching their noses through her garden before creeping into her paintings.
Anna-Carien has honed the skill of hanging art straight through numerous solo and group exhibitions. She's won the Naracoorte National Art Prize, South Africa's Living Portrait Master Competition, and appears as a semi-finalist on ABC's Australian Portrait Artist of the Year.
CV
Anna-Carien Goosen has exhibited widely through numerous solo and group shows across Australia, South Africa, and abroad.
In 2025, she was a semi-finalist on the inaugural Australian Portrait Artist of the Year. In 2019 she received the Naracoorte National Art Prize, and in 2017, the South African Portrait Society’s Living Portrait Master Award. Earlier in her career, she received an ATKVeertjie Award for children’s illustration (2005).
Her work is held in public collections including the South African Department of Foreign Affairs, the University of South Africa’s Permanent Collection, the Women’s War Memorial in Bloemfontein, and the ABSA Bank Collection.
Comfortable in any medium that serves the idea, she has exhibited evening gown net at Newcastle Gallery, exhibited woven hair at the Johannesburg Art Fair and enamel bowls at Maison et Objet in Paris. Currently she exhibits oil paintings in Australia and Europe
In 2014, her design venture Afro Delft represented South Africa at Maison et Objet in Paris, and later exhibited at Design Indaba in Cape Town (2015). From 2002–2004, Anna-Carien taught at Pro Arte Alphen Park, the School for the Arts in Pretoria, and from 2004–2008, she lectured at Inscape Design College. She’s been teaching art to adult groups on a weekly basis since 2001 including drawing, acrylic and oil mediums.