Painting by Natasha Khabarova is a new and striking phenomenon in the context of the Russian artistic process. Her works are already known to the Petersburg audience, but this is her first solo exhibition in the capital.
Natasha Khabarova was born in Latvia and lives and works in St. Petersburg. Since 2013, the artist has been taking part in exhibitions, including as part of the North 7 group. The years of study and search for her style were quite long: first, the St. Petersburg State University of Industrial Technologies and Design, then the Novosibirsk State University of Architecture, Design and Arts. specialty monumental and decorative art.
Upon returning to St. Petersburg, Khabarova first acts as a portrait painter, but then proceeds to work with nude. Today her painting is divided into figurative and non-figurative works, which have in common a dark, like a blurry color scale.
The difference between Khabarova and the St. Petersburg school is her breakthrough in the choice of the nude form and the interpretation of matter. Her works are fundamentally not metaphorical and do not seek to awaken associativity in the viewer. They are far from everyday life; "Colored by habit, the scenery becomes what it has always been." Khabarova writes without decorations, refusing plot and references to cultural codes.
“I need a body separate from the person who lies in it during these three or four hours of posing. My plots are no more difficult than just laying in a comfortable position, so that no one runs anywhere, does not prove and does not become loud and manifest, "said the author. Even the cat here is just a dark lump in the twilight interior, but the uncertainty of its silhouette is alarming.
In Khabarova's paintings, there is always a certain opposition of external amorphousness, generalization of forms and their coloristic density. This is an internal struggle between form and color, in which paints make a diversion, destroying linearity and the ability to “read” the surface of the texture. This is a game of contradictions, creation and destruction - the creation of a special, magical reality of art, on the way to which Khabarova uses color in an argument against form.
Evgeniya Kikodze
Open Studios
Free of Charge 