The Push and Pull Between Movement and Stillness: Now Representing Anico Mostert

Now Representing
Otomys is delighted to announce representation of Anico Mostert. 
 
Anico Mostert (b.1995, Cape Town) is a South African artist living and working in Cape Town, whose work explores the subtle moments of everyday life. Her approach to making is versatile, allowing her practice to remain intuitive and evolve as a continuous process of learning and discovery.
 
Through her distinctive and expressive style, Mostert invites viewers to reflect on how the spaces we inhabit shape, and are shaped by, our sense of self. She is particularly concerned with the experiential qualities of space and belonging, exploring how ‘lived spaces’ become vessels for memory, emotion, and identity. Her elongated figures, often set in open landscapes or spilling from empty rooms, reveal the inner tensions of existence: the stretching and moulding of the self as it responds to its surroundings.
 
These internal transformations, usually invisible to others, are made visible in her paintings. The figures seem to move with emotion, their forms shaped as much by feeling as by space. Through intuitive colour and bold, expressive brushwork, Mostert captures the ongoing dialogue between inner experience and environment, articulating a deeply human sense of being-in-the-world.
November 5, 2025

  • OTOMYS: As a figurative painter your figures bend, twist and spill across the canvas in a way that feels slightly surreal, neither fully human nor fully abstracted. This elongation gives the body a poetic, dreamlike quality, echoing both fragility and resilience. What first drew you to figurative painting and what keeps you returning to them as the central language in your work? 

     

    ANICO MOSTERT: I’ve always been drawn to the figure because I feel so much can be said in the smallest of gestures. I really like taking note of the way people use their bodies when they communicate, how they move through the world, how they interact with others and with their surroundings. There’s a language in that, which I explore in my paintings on the canvas, I can exaggerate a gesture or simplify it until it becomes just a suggestion , something open to interpretation. The elongated bodies in my work often feel like they carry a kind of weight or heaviness, but then with one simple movement, like the shift of an arm, that weight can be lifted. I like playing around with the figure in this way, pushing and pulling between movement and stillness, tension and release.

  • OTOMYS: Animals and landscapes often appear alongside your figures, as if part of a shared dialogue. These elements feel symbolic, even mythological. How do you think about their presence in your work and what kind of stories or archetypes do they allow you to explore?

     

    ANICO MOSTERT: At first, the figures always seemed to end up in small rooms, spilling out of the space, pushing against the walls, or just floating in them. Then, all of a sudden, I found myself painting them outdoors. I remember the first time it happened, it was a pink painting with a figure sitting at the end of a table, the table right in the middle of an empty landscape. I was surprised and excited by it. After that, it became

    really hard to put them back indoors.

     

    Now they often appear in big, open landscapes. I imagine it as a world where these characters live, a kind of alternate universe. Sometimes it feels utopic, and other times the vastness can feel claustrophobic. The colours can be sweet, but sometimes in a way that’s almost too much, like its also a bit sour. The animals started showing up more recently. They feel like companions to the figures, like a reflection of something inner or emotional. They definitely carry symbolic meaning, and that’s something I’m starting to explore more. Right now, they feel like part of the same world, part of the story, part of the mood.

  • OTOMYS: The body of work you’ve created for Otomys feels cohesive yet individually distinct, each carrying its own quiet narrative. Can you tell us about the ideas or themes that guided this body of work and how you see the paintings in conversation with one another?

     

    ANICO MOSTERT: These works follow a group of figures. The two group portraits especially feel like a continuation of one another, the same group of characters extending across the two canvases. I wanted them to feel like siblings. There’s a kind of intimacy between the figures. I was also thinking about the idea of mirroring. That idea of two people being cut from the same cloth, or maybe just finding themselves in a moment where they’re reflecting each other without even realising it. There’s something warm about that, like when you’re talking to someone and notice that you’ve both settled into the same position without thinking about it. I wanted to show that kind of moment.