Nina Murashkina makes sensual and metaphorical art which is built on her own sexuality and empirical knowledge of herself.
The artist crystallizes her own intimate experiences and reproduces her own vision of a woman through the vivid feminine images. The women with ambiguous and discredited positioning today are the Goddess: strong and weak at the same time with their snakelike plasticity and delicate sense, rational aspiration and irrational doubt that is able to capture but is more often to be captured.
She lives with the infinite thirst for the harmony of all her entities. Murashkina and her female characters are integral to each other, her stories are the ones of her own experiences and metaphorical self portraits. From a young age she subtly compiled her female image. The elegance of the 19th century was borrowed from the Victorian literature and boldly combined with the ghostly memories of the gloomy, late-Soviet life of Donetsk – the smell of nylon stockings and worn out mother’s pearls.
The realities of the environment where the artist formed are deliberately adorned by the aesthetics of the sentimental era. The fairy fabulousness of Nina’s world scares and the imaginary intimate images of her diaries arise their erotic tone. The artist openly and ironically speaks of one-time love, self-sacrificing trust and the naive play of a young woman towards maturity. With acquiring experience a young woman ascends the peak, where she could for the first time entirely embrace herself in artistic practice and peer into new perspectives.
Murashkina blatantly juggles with a variety of symbols in her works and among the accumulated cultural codes of the epoches the perceiver will meet the attending symbols which will lead them through the tunnels of the artist’s world.
For example, the eyes on the nipples are a long-standing image of hypersensitivity, the ability to rely on deep irrational inner instruments of cognition of the world.
A book unfolded on the knees is the pursuit of rational knowledge, which borders on physical desires and emotional elusiveness.
The bed is the space of the most important life events like sleep, dreams, love, conception, birth and death.
And the snakes, which are identified by the artist with femininity represent the elastic fineness, silence and fascinating sexuality. The Spanish artist Xavier Escala created the installation “I’m very shy.” based on Nina’s works, The artists’ tandem leads us to the key idea – harmony. This is an ideological display of the exposition and the symbolic act of sacrifice, which must be raised to itself, in order to leave everything unnecessary in the past and to allow it to exist in the future.
The exhibition “On the Top!” is the search for harmony, maturity and triumph of love of Nina Murashkina. And it’s also a milestone and a bold statement: “I have come true!”
To be continued.
Galina Gleba.
