RECENT WORKS
CHILDHOOD IN CAPTIVITY II | 2022
The story of the paintings unfolds around the theme of children’s play. The figures are in a semi-abstract environment, as if cut out and collaged on a flat unicoloured space. The characters don’t have faces, they are undefined. Their images are fuzzy, blurred and fragmented. Тhis lack of clarity aims to give us a feeling for a state of dream, memory, for a distant vision. Тhe children that we see in the paintings are set as if in usual, day-to-day situations, however, they look somehow lonely and anxious. On the one hand, in this project, I portray the idea of childhood through the point of view of the adult who had irrevocably forgotten their experience as a child. This bright and abundant period of life is only a fragmented memory, while the reality back then is forever veiled by the thousands of layers of the present. The images could be interpreted as an adult’s memory of themselves or as a projection of our fears and traumas onto our own children. On the other hand, the paintings could be looked at as an experience through a child’s inner world - misunderstood, controlled, over-patronized, placed in the boundaries and convictions of the adults on whom it depends. The result is a clash of worlds, which can never overlap with one another in this dynamic between a child and adult. Our fears and notion of what’s right drown this fictitious and boundless world where everything is possible and in which we had all once lived. Lost in our mundane worries, do we forget that we were also once children? Do we delude ourselves in our strive to show our children how to grow up, perceiving their world through our distant subjectiveness?
CHILDHOOD IN CAPTIVITY I | 2016 / 21
The story of the paintings unfolds around the theme of children’s play. The figures are in a semi-abstract environment, as if cut out and collaged on a flat unicoloured space. The characters don’t have faces, they are undefined. Their images are fuzzy, blurred and fragmented. Тhis lack of clarity aims to give us a feeling for a state of dream, memory, for a distant vision. Тhe children that we see in the paintings are set as if in usual, day-to-day situations, however, they look somehow lonely and anxious. On the one hand, in this project, I portray the idea of childhood through the point of view of the adult who had irrevocably forgotten their experience as a child. This bright and abundant period of life is only a fragmented memory, while the reality back then is forever veiled by the thousands of layers of the present. The images could be interpreted as an adult’s memory of themselves or as a projection of our fears and traumas onto our own children. On the other hand, the paintings could be looked at as an experience through a child’s inner world - misunderstood, controlled, over-patronized, placed in the boundaries and convictions of the adults on whom it depends. The result is a clash of worlds, which can never overlap with one another in this dynamic between a child and adult. Our fears and notion of what’s right drown this fictitious and boundless world where everything is possible and in which we had all once lived. Lost in our mundane worries, do we forget that we were also once children? Do we delude ourselves in our strive to show our children how to grow up, perceiving their world through our distant subjectiveness?
INDIVIDUAL IMAGES | 2016 - PRESENT
The paintings are part of various projects and exhibitions
INTERIOR | 2016
Saints Cyril and Methodius School, Negushevo Village
TOTAL BODY | 2014 / 16
Everything starts with the virtual meeting a smiling, online fitness instructor. Looking perfect, SHE is training just in front of you – on the monitor screen. SHE is a machine in doing push-ups. She is encouraging you using motivating remarks, believing that you can also do it! At no time she becomes your best friend. SHE is the one who is waiting for you "at home", and SHE has invited you at her place, too, smiling again and again, inspiring you with confidence that change is in you! She is now your idol.
The series of paintings – a self portrait Total Body, are provoked by my attempts to sculpt a perfect and strong body with "my online fitness instructor" ’s help. The depicted bodies have ceased to carry the proper meaning of an anatomical and physical regularity, but
they have begun to sound in an abstract way. The form has lost its determination and integrity, as well as the obsession with a perfect body can deform the look over oneself to unreal dimensions.
BASED ON TRUE STORY | 2014 / 15
Children’s dolls are placed into a role of scarecrows. In humans eyes, however, these dummies affect more as innocent victims, defenselessly crucified and ignominiously impaled on the stakes of the barbed-wire fence. The colours refer to some kind of body heat caught out by infrared sensors, emitted by the victims - the guards. The interaction between the characters, transfers to an unreal world. At first sight this seemingly fabulous and idyllic rural environment becomes a field of a silent war and a perverse threat.