Anya Gallaccio

Anya Gallaccio
View of Henry Bond and Sarah Lucas's East Country Yard Show with Gallaccio's installation in foreground, 1990
Born	1963 (age 53–54) Paisley, Scotland
Nationality	British
Education	Kingston Polytechnic and Goldsmiths College
Movement	Young British Artists

Anya Gallaccio (born 1963) is a British artist, who creates site-specific, minimalist installations and often works with organic matter (including chocolate, sugar, flowers and ice).

Her use of organic materials results in natural processes of transformation and decay, meaning that Gallaccio is unable to predict the end result of her installations. Something which at the start of an exhibition may be pleasurable, such as the scent of flowers or chocolate, would inevitably become increasingly unpleasant over time. The timely and site-specific nature of her work make it notoriously difficult to document. Her work therefore challenges the traditional notion that an art object or sculpture should essentially be a monument within a museum or gallery. Instead her work often lives through the memory of those that saw and experienced it - or the concept of the artwork itself.

Born in Paisley, Scotland to TV producer George Gallaccio and actress Maureen Morris. She grew up in south west London, England and studied at Kingston Polytechnic (1984-85) and Goldsmiths College (1985-88). In 1988 Gallaccio exhibited in the Damien Hirst-curated Freeze exhibition, and in 1990 the Henry Bond and Sarah Lucas organised East Country Yard shows, which brought together many of the Young British Artists. Gallaccio is a Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Much of her work uses organic materials, with fruit, vegetables and flowers all featuring in her work. Sometimes these materials undergo a change during the course their being exhibited. In Red on Green (1992), ten thousand rose heads placed on a bed of their stalks gradually withered as the exhibition went on. For Intensities and Surfaces (1996) Gallaccio left a thirty two ton block of ice with a salt core in the disused pump station at Wapping and allowed it to melt.