Anastasia Kovalenko "Search. Home" 0+

Malevich Street Gallery, 3rd floor

The artist Anastasia Kovalenko will exhibit at Artmuz a series of works devoted to the topic of constant search for a home: all her life she has been looking for her place and her point on the map, and the results of these wanderings have taken shape in the resounding project “Search. House".

Anastasia Kovalenko is in constant search of a home, waltzing between the eastern strip of Russia, the coasts of the southern and northern seas throughout her life. In his works, the author wants to share his impressions of wandering, briskly switching from the local originality of local landscapes to the dynamics of mountain landscapes. It is also worth paying attention to the fact that in the series “Search. House ”there is no stable visual scenario, which refers to the stylistic heterogeneity of the country, which served as a source of inspiration: painfully familiar slate sheets covering the barn, geese, panel houses and the weighed contours of skyscrapers on the horizon, steppe canvases, mountains and herds…

The outcome of the search does not lie on the surface, being not devoid of its own contradictions: there are places close to the heart, sometimes they are beautiful visually, however, for the most part, they are filled with memories, where the decisive word remains for habit and subjectivity. Cities are objectively beautiful, whose charm is undeniable on the basis of certain universal criteria, can leave indifferent the artist, for whom texture is inseparable from psychology and memory, both individual and group. The opposite also happens, when the landscapes boring to the eye become an oppressive plain, pushing out of the "house" onto the road in the name of continuing the search, which, as it turns out, did not stop at all.

“Being away from home, you think more seriously about your roots, you begin to analyze the intolerable craving for certain regions and rejection for others. You synthesize what you see, passing through the prism of yourself from the past. Probably that is why it is difficult to dwell on certain motives and confine oneself to pure technique, ”the artist admits.