Anya Roberts-Toney makes color-driven oil paintings that explore femininity, pleasure and the precarity of how the female body gets viewed. Her practice is motivated by the false promise that the objectives of feminism have been accomplished and how Western art history (which promises pleasure for the viewer at the subject's expense) reinforces expectations of womxn’s frailty by utilizing the female body as an object for viewing. Roberts-Toney’s artworks inhibit the availability of the female figure—and the paintings themselves—by using varying levels of abstraction and obfuscation. Bodies overlap and morph with the scenery; arching shapes and portals bisect the landscape; perspective shifts from deep to shallow. By combining marks that shroud with moments of pleasure, her works activate—and complicate—the desire to look.

Anya Roberts-Toney was born in 1984 in Seattle, WA, and currently resides in Portland, OR. She earned an MFA in visual studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR, in 2014; a BA in studio art from Brown University in Providence, RI, in 2006; and studied at the School of Visual Arts in Florence, Italy, in 2004.

The artist has presented solo exhibitions at Nationale in Portland, OR (2021 and 2020), Lodge Gallery in Portland, OR (2019), and Stephanie Chefas Projects in Portland, OR (2019).

Roberts-Toney’s paintings have been in recent group exhibitions such as Virtual Group Show #7 at Shrine in New York City, NY (2021); The Way of Flowers at Dust to Dust in Portland, OR (2018); and the Annual Art Auction at Oregon Contemporary in Portland, OR (2016-2013). She received the Hopper Prize (2022), the Oregon Arts Commission grant (2020), the Ford Family Foundation grant (2020), and the Stumptown Artist Fellowship (2018).

She has also been featured in many publications, including Oregon Artswatch, Art & About PDX, Panhandler Magazine, and PDX Art Now Magazine.