Elizabeth Bank’s exhibition "The Nightmare of an Art Critic"

Grotesque is an emotion, state, mobility and unpredictability of life, any phenomenon in which, even the most insignificant and everyday, can be perceived as a carnival.

The exhibition of Elizabeth Bank “The Nightmare of an Art Critic” poses the question of the role of the grotesque, irony and fantasy in contemporary art, illustrates their impact on our modern life. This technique is good in that it removes decorativeness in painting - alluvial elements that have been created by artists for many thousands of years to make the form more attractive and perfect, and captivate the audience with false significance and false beauty. Elizabeth Bank does not embellish reality, but, on the contrary, cuts off all that is superfluous and superfluous, leaving one single, most important element - pure emotion, a sense of internal state, hypertrophied by the artist and transferred to the canvas.

The exhibition features self-portraits, portraits of friends and acquaintances, images of real and fictional characters, heroes of fairy tales and films, as well as works of classical art, placed in different, everyday, familiar, and extraordinary, absurd situations. Through self-irony and ridicule, the artist shows the viewer life in all its mobility, variability, in all its manifestations, not unreasonably believing that it is through grotesque and irony that our true essence can be revealed.

Elizabeth Bank does not follow any canons and rules, rather her work was created under the influence of the concept of her beloved Joseph Beuys, who claimed that “every person is an artist”.

About myself:

My name is Elizabeth, I was born in Leningrad in 1990. I draw my whole conscious and unconscious life. Received primary art education, graduating from art school number 2. Now I am engaged in contemporary art as a theoretician and as a practitioner: I graduated from SPbGUKI, specializing in art history, I work in this field and continue to paint every free second of my time.

For a long time she was fond of graphics, influenced by the biblical subjects of Marc Chagall, but in recent years she discovered color, and color has become for me a guide to the world of true, honest art. Calling art “true”, I do not pretend to this title, but only determine the boundaries of my interests. Such art does not seek to be beautiful and aesthetically attractive, but becomes a tool for self-knowledge. I believe that the use of the grotesque is a necessary condition for creating “honest” art, therefore I resort to this technique as often as possible, because only through the grotesque and irony, as well as our attitude towards them, our true essence can be revealed.

Among contemporary artists, I am inspired by the manifestos and ideas of Nikolai Kopeikin and Elena Figurina. The principle of “disappointing, not charming”, used by Kopeikin, is close to me, and Figurina is for me an example of a woman artist who has overcome and destroyed the usual stereotypes about female art in the world of art.