Over the years
Originally from Moscow, I arrived in France in the early 2000s, after graduating from the Moscow Film School (VGIK).
The training in fine arts at this school had a very specific feature. In parallel to the academic disciplines of painting and drawing, our daily training ground was the reading of literary texts (future screenplay), their analysis and their setting in images (storyboard). The exercise was to translate the text into visual language by the means of the plastic arts.
Years later, during my residency in Florence to perfect my a fresco painting technique, I produced a series of travel diaries inspired by the poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (a collection of poems slipped into the bottom of my suitcase).
The contact is renewed with the text which becomes my source of inspiration par excellence. The travel notebooks (2012) will be followed by a fresco panels (2013) and a series of drawings (2014). During Book Fairs and exhibitions, I discovered the French tradition of the Livre d'Artiste. This form of language and dialogue between author, artist and reader attracts my attention and directs me towards a new medium, artistic engraving.
In 2014, I joined the studio of the Danish artist-printmaker Torben Bo Halbirk. This was followed by years of fruitful work in his studio, a real creative hive and an experimental laboratory in the field of contemporary printmaking.
This encounter, rich in artistic exchange and unique on a human level, will give birth to my first Artist's Book "Poem of the Mountain" (2016), followed by a bas-relief "Poem of the Air" (2017), a work in duet with Bo Halbirk for the commission of the Marina Tsvetaeva Museum in Moscow.
A second book, "Poem of the End" is being undertaken in 2018 as a joint project. It lends itself to an experiment on the colour of rust, on corrosion and self-destruction. Bo Halbirk, having left us prematurely in August 2018, will not see the completion of this project. The book will be published in 2020 and dedicated to his memory.
I continue my work by exploring the demanding path of printmaking.
This silent and timeless art has become for me both a source and a medium of creation.