Bio

Ann Marie Auricchio (b. 1972, New York, NY) is a painter and installation artist living and working in New Orleans, Louisiana. After graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art where she double-majored in painting and sculpture, Auricchio merged her disciplines as a scenic artist and designer for film, theater and television. During her 20-year tenure in the entertainment industry, she led and executed monumental projects for award-winning classics such as Requiem for a Dream, Broadway’s Lion King, and mega-films like John Wick. In 2019, Auricchio closed that chapter and embraced her studio practice full time. Since then she’s realized a 90ft installation at the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans, completed the prestigious Joan Mitchell Center Residency (2021-2022), and debuted the narrative series created in-residence at Octavia Gallery. Auricchio’s work belongs to several corporate collections, including: Azamara Cruise Lines and the Scott Companies. 

 

Artist Statement

Through painting and installation, I underline the ubiquity of connection—of people to one another, of nature to us—and create environments that reflect unto themselves. Each of the spaces, whether painted with oil and acrylic or executed with found materials and digital projections, simultaneously presents translucency and shadow and alludes to the inseparability of all that’s come before, and the immediate experience. 

 

In my work, time is not linear but rather encompassing, and connections are not tethers but rather sensations, rushing or diving or rocking or swinging. They’re seen in my abstract thrusts of paint, or shards of wood set in a xylophonic composition. With lyrical movement—my own, and within the materials I incorporate—I aim to capture the cyclical qualities of striving: perseverance, disappointment, failure, overcoming. Some strokes are long and bright, others short and flitty, but they all join to create a fire of possibility; a continuum of experience of what could be. 

 

I grew up staring at power lines strung overhead and often thought about how they, these static drawings in the sky, charted paths across divides, like vines. How these lines both cut and create space (and place), containers for our explosions and evolutions; in each landscape I paint or realize, there are dark voids and light open spaces, always with concentrated, dense segments of both tension and determination. While my paintings and installations are not such literal renderings of that urban musing, they are pulsing with lines and power, hopefully containers where emotion is pushed to the surface. I hope the feeling of imminence and continuation is what comes through.