Biography

Rita Sassani is an artist based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, who focuses on painting, sculpting, and batik art. She is a graduate from the NBCCD College. Her works are expressive in nature, characterized by intense colors, movement, and abstract compositions, and can be found in private collections and galleries, both nationally and internationally.

Artist statement

Although my paintings are based on live models, I treat the figure as a composition of shapes created by different lines and patterns. I view people as being intertwined with nature and thus I leave outlines away so that negative space flows into the positive space, conjoining the figure and background. I associate people with colors, which to me encapsulate meaning. Because the human figure is expressive, I love to apply bright and strongly contrasting colors to express movement. The human face though contains too much information and personality absorbing all focus and attention away from the human figure, reason why I downplay it in my works and instead focus primarily on the human body. My paintings are strong in dialogue, which evolves during the drawing and painting, between segments that have lots of value, and those that have none, between color and no color. The quality of line differs between thick and strong, between movement and calmness in different parts of the composition. With my contemporary works I seek to capture the expressiveness inherent in the human figure.