breedveld khoroshilova

Anastasia Khoroshilova (b.1978, Moscow)

Anastasia Khoroshilova belongs to the new generation of artists from ‘post-diaspora' Russia. Educated and living abroad, they see themselves as part of the international scene but not as emigrants. They use their work to construct their own Russian identity.

Anastasia Khoroshilova went at boarding school in Germany in 1993. After spending some time in London and in Moscow, she returned back to Germany to attend the art academy in Essen. Her first series of photographs were about living at the boarding school, subjects she experienced from the times she moved around from one place to another.

Her recent series were shot in Russia, photographing daily life in isolated surroundings: a village, a military town, an orphanage, a dance academy and a school for sports. They are al enclosed areas or spaces, not accessible for the accidental visitor.

Art for Anastasia is a form of self-analysis, taking stock of her own personal experience of society.

MKgalerie.nl will be showing photographs of Khoroshilova from the series Bezhin Meadow , Baltiysk , Islanders/Ssawino-Storozhewskij Konvent and Islanders/Boarding School of State Academy of Choreography at the Bolshoi Theatre .

Marian Breedveld (b.1959, Brussels)

‘Haze and Smoke'

The materiality of paint is to be taken literally in Marian Breedveld's paintings. Thickly applied, paint moves away from all forms of illusionism requiring renewed attention from the viewer. The thickness of its application, the ‘stratification' of the paint becomes the meaning of the work. The many layers on top of each other do not create a representational image, but of vision of substance leading to a physical sensation.

The emphatic stratification in the paintings highlights the physical limitations of the process of making these. The top layer, the outer surface of the painting is like an elastic skin. An impervious and tight membrane that screens and protects the outside from the inside. On the other hand, this ‘screen' is a space that mediates sensations from the inner to the outer and vice versa.

The outer ‘skin' of paint also suggests what lies under it. Traces of underlying colours, former paint strokes, make contact with the skin of paint that covers them. The surface is thus marked or scarred by what is underneath. When looking at her work, tactile experiences are brought about. The reference to skin in Breedveld's paintings, the most tactile of organs, contributes to more physical rather than purely visual experience of her work.

Extract from ‘Opgenomen in abstractie'

by Ernst van Alphen.
The text was previously published with the edition ‘ Windstil/Calme plat',

edited by Hein Elferink, 2004