Anuk Rocha populates her figurative works with lonely characters that inhabit imagined worlds outside the norms of mainstream society. Her subjects, rendered with distinctive, haunting silver eyes, range from sailors adrift at sea to performers in traveling circuses, depicting those who choose to live unconventional, autonomous lives on the fringes. For Rocha, these imaginary fringe figures deeply resonate with her own ongoing search for identity and sense of displacement as the daughter of Muslim immigrants growing up in Germany and now residing as an expat in France. She aims to celebrate the unconventional paths of outsiders in order to make sense of her own complex cultural background and uprooted identity.

Rocha's highly textured, boldly expressive paintings combine acrylic, oil pastel, charcoal, and collage in an raw, intuitive multimedia approach. Her aggressively scratched and layered surfaces, created with painting knives, fingers, sandpaper, and more, coupled with loose, energetic brushwork, evoke a vibrant sense of creative freedom and spontaneity. The mixed media works not only capture her impressions of Marseille's urban environment, but also poetically communicate deeper emotions and the unseen inner lives of her subjects. Rocha harnesses the gestural, visual language of her multimedia process to convey feelings that words cannot fully capture.