Artist statement based on the paintings in the exhibition I saw:
"Document" is a very personal work for Nadia, in which the history of the country where she was born and brought up is closely intertwined with history of her own family. These paintings reveal the condition of people in the last days and hours of their lives. The images of people in''Document'' are based on the mug shots of ordinary people who were living during the period of Stalinist repression. They show workers, students, teachers, members of army and the communist party. The broad range of ages and nationalities shows the scale of the prosecution at the time.
The artist’s work does this with considerable compassion, at the same time examining the unfolding events that would soon change for ever these peoples’ lives. Nadia undertakes the daring task of limiting her usually colourful palette to shades of black and white only, in order to achieve this powerful imagery. She has said: "Painting in black and white helps me to get closer to the image and to the time when these mug shots were taken."
Although the influence of the original images, the mug shot photographs of 30s and 40s, are obvious, the aim of this series of works is different: it is to re-create the visual history of every person within the limitation of the primal material. This she does with a lot of dedication.
It is a compassionate study of human tragedy, in which the artist aims to examine the role of the individual within the framework of historic events and to question the relationship between the state and the individual."
from http://www.oneoffart.net/nadia/
(To show what interested me the most in her statement I highlighted the key points. What has influenced me is the way she creates her brush marks, and the choice to use a very minimal colour palette, which is what I find to be more successful and powerful in my drawings of places. Even though it is a different subject matter, I can take away from her work the way she layers up the paint to create dimension.
I really enjoyed her exhibition).
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