Natalia Zemlyanaya. World Creation. Painting and Graphic Art

St Petersburg artist Natalia Zemlyanaya’s solo exhibition features approximately 80 of her paintings and pastels from the 1990s and 2000s. Zemlyanaya belongs to the fourth generation of artists professing the philosophy of holistic culture – pioneered by Wassily Kandinsky, Mikhail Matyushin and their pupils – in what is known to art historians as the second wave of Russian avant-garde art, led by Vladimir Sterligov, Pavel Kondratyev, and their many followers. Another major influence on the artist was the Russian art lineage known as Structuralism, associated with the Hermitage School of the late 1960s – 1980s, which, in turn, drew on the colouristic figurative ideas of the Russian avant-garde movement.

The exhibition includes works by Zemlyanaya from various series on which she has worked throughout her entire career. Their straightforward titles – Simple Shapes, Birds, Structures, Squares, Ovals, Circles, Labyrinths and Angels – will help art lovers orient themselves in the artist’s complex oeuvre, which Zemlyanaya creates as one would poetry or music. Music frequently occurs in her works, either as the subject matter or as evidence of the organic interaction among different forms of art – an idea that underlies avant-garde theory. Two other series with works featured in this exhibition are Portraits and Flowers. The latter, focusing on Zemlyanaya’s impressions of nature, eloquently reveals the idiosyncrasies of her colouristic/figurative thinking. A master of the language of colour-form, Natalia Zemlyanaya wields her artistic acumen to transform the visible world of phenomena into a magical world of art.