Currently: Santa Monica, CA

Introduction: “The theses represented in this exhibition have been guiding principles in a coherent and tranformational history of experien- ce which, already at the time of the first showing of The Hundred Languages of Children exhibition in 1981, characterised experience in Reggio infant-toddler centres and preschools.

These theses are mindful of the many events causing vast transformations in culture and society, in economics and politics, in Reggio Emilia, in Italy, in the world. These theses are sensitive to guidelines in national curriculum. Above all else however, they are capable of guiding our choices for humanity, for liberty, for democracy.”

The exhibition The Wonder of Learning “presents a narrative and communicative structure designed to reflect the contemporaneity, the complexity, and the plurality of points of view that have always characterized the work carried out in the infant-toddler centres and preschools of Reggio Emilia“

Eleanna Anagnos “describes her painting process as an ongoing dialogue between herself and the canvas. Her vision lies in the synthesis of accumulated marks and her marks, in concert, bear evidence of the events that fill our own lives: not just the noticeable ones, but also the moments sometimes beneath notice—those too small to see, even though daily life is suffused with them. Anagnos is not interested in the conventional beginning/middle/end narrative. Instead, her work is born without the notion of conclusion. Through a deep connection to her own process—by building up and breaking down, incorporating and wiping away, flipping the canvas, working more intuitively in one session and more formally in the next—Anagnos focuses on creating a system of exchange between personal history, mood, and the anxiety of a never-still mind and the formulations (volume, variation, repetition, touch, and color) of drawing and painting. To Anagnos, energy is what counts.

Her process imbues her paintings with a pulse, a rhythm that endures long after the artist decides her content can stand alone. Through manipulating paint and graphite, Anagnos examines the multiplicity of how paint is used: fast and slow, thick and thin, dripping or gobbed on. She slashes color across the canvas to cue movement; she leads us seamlessly and surprisingly from one thought, behavior, memory or action to the next; with an assertive and instinctual strike, she makes reference to aggression in ways planned decisions simply cannot intimate. Further, Anagnos gestures with the sturdiness of architecture, thereby holding together the elements of disorder. In relinquishing control of the work, Anagnos finds that meaning reveals itself. Her paintings breathe and exist as living proof of the abundant information, feeling, and physicality so intimately encoded in the process and therefore, in the raw paint itself.”