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  • The Paris Review

    Late Art

    by Anna Ostoya and Ben Lerner Sep 13, 2018 6 minutes

    In the winter of 2015, Ben Lerner wrote a short story, “The Polish Rider,” incorporating fictionalized elements of the life and work of the artist Anna Ostoya, who had recently lost two of her canvases in the back of an Uber. As the narrator of the story helps the artist search for the missing canvases, he fantasizes about “recuperating the lost paintings through prose,” about how the verbal might take the place of the visual. After the story was published in The New Yorker, Ostoya painted the painting Lerner had invented based on her earlier work, transforming the fiction without changing any of the words. Ostoya went on to produce a series of compositions that respond to the story she’d helped inspire. In the essay below, Lerner describes how Ostoya’s actual body of work catalyzed the fiction.

    View of “Slaying,” Anna Ostoya, 2016, Bortolami Gallery, New York.

    That winter, a small pneumonia bloomed in his left lung. He’d embarked on a second course of antibiotics, the first having proved insufficient. He was getting better but was weak, and by about eight o’clock

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