This sculptural work takes the familiar shape of a banana and twists it—literally and conceptually—into something more tender, absurd, and charged. Its smooth ceramic skin is dotted with nipples, turning the fruit into a body, a landscape, a punchline.

Both erotic and ridiculous, Peel Me Softly plays with the banana’s loaded symbolism: fertility, desire, gender clichés, slapstick. But by covering it in nipples, Anna Riess disarms the viewer’s expectations. The banana becomes soft, sensitive, humanized. It’s no longer just a stand-in for masculine bravado—it blushes, it squirms, it becomes vulnerable.

As with many of Riess’s works, humor and bodily distortion are used to question how objects (and people) are gendered, fetishized, and consumed. What happens when an everyday icon of phallic symbolism grows breasts? When comedy becomes critique?

Peel Me Softly is a playful yet pointed exploration of how intimacy, absurdity, and embodiment can overlap—reminding us that even the most ordinary forms can carry wildly unexpected meanings.

Anna Riess is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural anthropologist based in Vienna. Her work explores themes of embodiment, emotion, and interbodily relations through materials like clay, metal, and textiles. Deeply influenced by her experience of motherhood, she transforms everyday objects into symbolic forms - one of her gestures she describes as the “nippelization of the everyday.”

Riess is the co-founder of the Clayground retreat and the creator of Circle of Clay, a workshop series she has led at institutions such as the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna or the Hotel Kai36 in Graz. Her workshops invite participants—regardless of prior experience—to develop their own sculptural language through hands-on engagement with clay.

Her sculptural objects possess a strong visual identity and tactile presence, marked by a recognizable aesthetic and a willingness to push the boundaries of material behavior. Especially drawn to the tactility of clay, Riess explores how movement and fluidity can be captured in form—leaving the trace of the hand visible in its hardened state. With a strong interest in local materials and interdisciplinary exchange, her practice bridges artistic, social, and ecological concerns in both conceptual and applied ways.