Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio
The Poetics of Biology
Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio (b. 1955, Paris, France) is an abstract painter and fiber artist whose work is a vibrant exploration of color, emotion, and the cycle of life. Self-taught for most of her life after first picking up a brush at age seventeen in 1970s Paris, her artistic path included periods of experimentation with various media and hiatuses before she fully recommitted to painting. This recommitment was solidified upon completing her MFA in Visual Art from the Institute of Art and Design at New England College in January 2020. She also holds a Master's in Art History (1993) and Museum Studies (2015).
Art as a Dance of Trauma and Celebration
Working in her studio at the Western Avenue Studios and Lofts in Lowell, MA, Delaunay-Danizio creates organic shapes and abstract landscapes that balance joy and tension. Her practice, which she identifies as Abstract Expressionist, is driven by internal rhythms and a "lust for life," serving as a dance of trauma and celebration. With visual puns, humor, and evocations of organisms and internal and external body parts, she crafts a "poetics of biology" that challenges boundaries—between genders, human and non-human, body and landscape.
Her mantra, “All that live shall die,” informs her artistic process, which reenacts the wonder of living and the inevitability of decay. The act of creation is a reminder of the cycle of birth, growth, death, and renewal.
Process and Influences
Delaunay-Danizio's intuitive process of discovery is central to her work. For her paintings, she begins by staining the canvas with liquid acrylic paint and ink, creating random shapes and building layers by erasing and redesigning initial marks. Her textile sculptures echo the paintings through a slower, more meditative process of weaving threads around a metal frame.
Her artistic heritage finds sources in early twentieth-century masters such as Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, and Louise Bourgeois, whose legacy she finds continually relevant. As a young artist in Paris, she was profoundly influenced by the sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle. She also finds contemporary affinity with American artists of her generation, including Sheila Peppe, Carrie Moyer, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
A former elementary school teacher in France and college-level French instructor in the Boston area, Anne-Marie Delaunay-Danizio now lives with her husband in Salem, NH. Her artworks have been exhibited in numerous locations across Massachusetts (Arlington, Cambridge, Boston, Lowell) and New Hampshire (Manchester, Hooksett), as well as in New York City and Luxembourg.
The Delaunay-Danizio Collection
Color, emotions, rhythms.
There is much joy and tension in my practice. I delight in colors, and in creating organic shapes and abstract landscapes.
My art is a dance of trauma and celebration, which follows internal rhythms. Lust for life transcends the human body, and challenges boundaries between genders, human and non-human, body and landscape, internal organs and external appearance. My mantra is “All that live shall die.” The act of painting reenacts the wonder of living and the inevitability of decay and serves as a reminder of the cycle of birth, growth, death and renewal.
With humor, visual puns, evocations of organisms, and of internal and external body parts, I create poetics of biology.
The intuitive process of discovery that characterizes my paintings, finds it sources in artists born at the turn of the twentieth century, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler and Louise Bourgeois. Their legacy is still relevant to my contemporaneity. The sculptor Nikki de Saint Phalle also had a strong influence on me as a young artist coming of age in Paris in the 1970s. I also find affinities with American artists of my generation, Sheila Peppe, Carrie Moyer, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
While staining the canvas and creating random shapes with liquid acrylic paint and ink, I build layers by erasing and redesigning the initial marks. The textile sculptures echo the paintings, through a slower and meditative process of weaving threads around a metal frame.
