LIUDMYLA RASHTANOVA
12-XI-1981
Kyiv, UKRAINE
Lyudmila Rashtanova is a Ukrainian artist. She was born in Kyiv in 1981. In 2006, she graduated from the National Faculty of the Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (easel graphics workshop under Professor A.V. Chebikin). She works with easel graphics, easel painting, and installation. Lyudmila started her exhibition activity in 2003. She lives and works in Kyiv. Lyudmila Rashtanova often incorporates paper, rapidly disappearing from our lives, in her works. And not only as a material and medium but also as an aesthetic category. In her paintings, such momentary things as newspaper articles, postcards, letters, valuable photographs are often immortalized. The artist incorporates pop art, symbolism, trance avant-garde, and impressionism. Her style is recognizable but devoid of the pretentious buffoonery properties of the frequent eclectic style heavily mixed with pop art. The timid color scheme of her color perception usually burst with one color accent. The artist masterfully works with fonts and calligraphic phenomena, often incorporating Japanese aesthetics of engravings and calligraphy. Reminiscence and longing for the aesthetics of everyday life fill the artist's work: daily newspapers, steamships, handwritten letters, traveling circuses, greeting cards, which she skillfully interweaves in her works. These elements meet a new reality, and sometimes tomorrow's post-truth, transhumanism, total digitalization. Rashtanova's works are often perceived as sad jokes coming out of a beautiful ingenue who has just finished reading a book by a post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Dereze or Roland Barthes.
(Written by Alexander Zakletsky).