Natalia Korotyaeva © “Il mio deserto” 2021– Courtesy of Lusvardi Art

 
5 NOVEMBRE – 3 DICEMBRE 2021
LUSVARDI ART, CORSO BUENOS AIRES 45, 20124 MILANO

Lusvardi Art (Corso Buenos Aires, 45) presents “Il mio deserto” (My desert), the first solo show by Russian artist Natalia Korotyaeva (Saint Petersburg, 1986), to be held in Italy, curated by Angelica Moschin. 

On view from November 5th to December 3rd, 2021, the project is a broad overview of the work of Korotyaeva and gathers a thorough selection of her most recent artworks – a series of ink on paper drawings – realized between 2020 and 2021. 

Natalia Korotyaeva’s oeuvre is characterized by a complex, haunting, and vaguely eldritch visual language. In her works – spanning various mediums such as sculpture, drawing, street art and performance – the artist focuses on humanity and its position in today’s society. Her female figures, ubiquitous in her work, neither adhere to classical rules and ideals nor to today’s beauty stereotypes yet they reveal her unique longing for new forms and narratives. 

As a figment of the artist’s troubled subconscious, these ascetic and steadfast creatures are mostly portrayed free of any spatial context and set in timeless and barren landscapes, more emotional than physical in nature, that the viewer is invited to complete and activate in the innermost depths of the soul. 

On the walls of Lusvardi Art, the exhibition unfolds through thematic groups that trace the development of the artist’s visual vocabulary, starting with the nervous and rugged gesture of her ink on papers drawings, to her mysterious clay sculptures that seem to withdraw from contact into the matter that breed them. Drawing, intended both as mold, process and outcome, is the foundation on which Natalia Korotyaeva’s work grows and thrives. It is recollection and reconstitution of primeval archetypes as well as an attempt to fixate what is always left adrift in the moment. But it is also, first and foremost, an aesthetic and religious experience, with a Kierkegaardian bent, striving to accept the tragic sense of life - sine qua non condition for elevating men’s soul to a higher spirituality. 

Immersed in a livid and rarefied atmosphere, her figures act as an intermediary between past and present, street and altar but also as a vital trait d’union between the artist’s inner world, mostly perceived as quiet and elemental, and the outer world, blurred and hectic, brimming with hardship and anxiety. They are will-o’-the-wisps that oftentimes seem to be pulled back into the cycle of history, to its dawnings, when saints still indulged in fantasies of plenitude with God. They are “verlöschend”, as Anton Webern would have it on the score: caught in the act of fading while also relinquishing the comfort of things - be they a name, a story or a shelter in the desert.

Angelica Moschin, 2021