the turquoise ether magazine’s mission is to publish independent critical reviews of promising artists from over The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)

Turquoise #19 | Anastasia Kurakina (Russia)

Anastasia Kurakina, born in '87, is an internationally renowned visual artist who has already had over ten years of experience, having inaugurated her first exhibition in 2005 in her hometown, Moscow. To date, she has been exhibiting internationally (Moscow, Mexico, Los Angeles, London, Milan, Venice, Switzerland, Oxford, Cambridge, St. Petersburg, Rome, Porto Cervo and other locations) in galleries, museums and unusual contests. She is the winner of many national and international art awards. Kurakina’s works are present in the collections of the Vatican Museums in Rome, in the International Museum of Humor in Art in Tolentino, in the National Museum of Sacred Art in Nonantola, in the Centro di Studi Manzoniani in Milan, in the Nina Lobanova — Rostovskaya collection in London, in the Marchesi Sacchetti collection in Rome and in many other private collections in Italy, Great Britain, Germany, Russia, United States, China, etc.

The soul of Anastasia Kurakina has always been nourished by the sacred fire of art, so much so that even before starting to walk she was surrounded by art in all its forms. The artist recalls that at an early age she loved to spend hours and hours leafing through art books of the Italian Renaissance, contemplating the beauty and mastery of the cornerstones of art history. Kurakina since the age of three has always known that she would become a painter and, from that moment on, that great passion has always been well rooted and present in her state of mind. In her works we can find many memories of the great masters of contemporary art including Modigliani, Morandi, Bacon, Hockney, Van Gogh, Klimt, Schiele… , proof of her commendable craftsmanship and progressive stylistic evolution. Each work of Kurakina has a history and its development in which she is not only the creator but she participates in the creative process of which result she is quite unaware,and Anastasia loves to continually surprise herself with her own creations.

[…] The aspects of life form my palette: sensual, psychological, olfactory, visual and instinctive. My paintings are born as a puzzle of elements of various kinds: the flavors of the dishes, the laughter of a child, the spots on the fur of a hare fleeing in the woods, the reflection of the sunset in the glass of a lemon juice. These elements are not faithfully reproduced on the canvas but are transformed very often and unpredictably into another substance: the flavor appears as a silhouette of a dancer, the laughter of a child becomes a pink cloak of this dancer, the color of the hare become her hair that shines in the light of day and the sun reflected in the orange juice inspires me to make a sand under the feet of this dancer. I am looking for a new interpretation of the visible […] Kurakina“s works are a personal interiorization that matches the search for a deeper meaning, beyond visible reality. Her”s is a desire to go beyond the pure representation of reality, a need to tell something that goes beyond the external aspect, that something that speaks of the inner part of those who are portrayed. Kurakina responds to an ancestral and primary need, namely the desire to stop a memory and make it materially eternal. The artist’s attention is directed towards the inner life of the subject, where shapes and colors become the way of expressing more than physicality: portraits that excite the observer, who manages to enter into the representation of emotions but also into the inner essence of people. The faces are enriched with subtle and beautifully refined expressions that reveal an emotional world overflowing with emotions and dreams.

The portraits of Anastasia Kurakina are not descriptions of the physiognomies in a realistic sense but capture the essence of the subject, in a nutshell they are a snapshot of the soul. In addition, she as an artist is able to capture in a few gestures the moment in which the subject fully reveals his soul, his most intimate and authentic being. The charm of Kurakina“s works lies in her mature introspective talent, which allows her to bring the most intimate qualities of the person to expression, transforming each portrait into an inner mirror. She manages to enhance what she encounters and to embody everything that is charged in a gaze, giving strength to the gestural sign and color. Anastasia dialogues with the chromatic material which she lets flow freely onto the support, touching the most intimate strings of the viewer”s soul. They are colorful emotions that cling to the support and that are established in the soul through the perception of the visual impulse. Each color represents an emotion and a feeling, vibrating on the support, becoming the narrative of an eternalized fleeting moment. Each subject is placed in a thoughtful, detached atmosphere but at the same time not devoid of emotional participation. Kurakina’s language is characterized by freedom of the sign, soft chromatism and rapidity of representation. She is an artist recognized above all for her ability to translate emotional expressions, inner disturbances in order to reveal the psyche of the represented subjects. Anastasia Kurakina does not portray reality but it is the reality itself to become a representation of the inner world of all of us, in a portentous whole.

Author:

Federica Fabrizi

art curator, historian,expert in modern and contemporary painting and sculpture at the Rome Chamber of Commerce