6.09.2022 Maria Bregman is a journalist, writer and contemporary art researcher.

In our shimmering, colourful world, the illusory strokes put us into a state of spirituality and flight shaping works of contemporary artists, designers, ceramicists and photographers.

It was believed in the ancient world that clay figures could come to life. Artists for thousands of years have been using nature not only as a source of inspiration but as a source of materials. Anna Salyaeva is one of those artists, whose pieces get animated in her hands and in our imagination.  

She is a ceramist born and raised in Ufa, Bashkortostan, a multinational and multi-confessional environment that shaped her as an artist, who appreciates diversity. She spent a part of her life in the taiga, has travelled extensively in Russia and around the world, exploring the identity of each place and people.

Anna’s thought-provoking works pose questions and spark conversations about the duality of the world. She explores the way of human development and the different sides of learning, inner experiences and what trace it all leaves in a person. How we develop as humans, exploring our identity through the body, through another culture, development and the inner crisis, when it feels like you’ve hit rock bottom and you can’t push back.

“All my work is an experiment. I’m trying a lot at once. It’s the new clay and huge works at once. I go for the clay. I let it express itself. I trust the clay and at the same time I’m exploring it,” said Anna Salyaeva.

Elena Reznikova uses mixed media digital collages as well as drawings and watercolours in order to escape into individual self-expression and to capture a fragile and uncertain realm of creative impulse.

The artist poses the questions: “What is creativity? Why are we creative? How do I find my escape to experiencing it fully?” In her digital collage “Implicate Order” Elena juxtaposes a run-of-the-mill object with the repetitive natural shapes, thus finding the rhythm and a sense of breaking away from the grid, the system. This is a common thread through her various series of mixed media artworks. Elena Reznikova creates ambiguous pieces, the narrative behind which remains unfinished; the artist invites her viewer to continue the story and to bring their own creativity into interpreting the artwork. She asserts an idea that real art is something that can only occur between an artwork and a viewer.

Christina Baeva, already a well-known artist and performer, is involving us in her multifaceted inner world, searching for the new and unknown, to answer the questions about the meaning of life, eternity and peaceful coexistence. The issue that is constantly brought up in her pieces is the change in one’s life and whether it is necessary to search for oneself.

Christina’s practice encourages spectators to break away from the stereotypes and open the heart to new sensations and emotions. Subtly yet precisely her works broaden the horizons of human experience elevating the sensual nature of it.

Sonja Nichai is an artist who has captured the attention of many, has won art prizes, and gained international recognition.

“For me, the world is a series of fragile and constantly changing forms, a play of light and shadows, a blurring of boundaries and rules,” says Sonja Nechai. Details in her paintings are illusory yet interconnected indeed. Borders vanish and subjects intertwine, forming a world that is hazy but at the same time homogeneous and constant. The key source of her inspiration is a feeling of attachment to life and collision with reality of different facets of the world, which Sonya Nechai loves tenderly. Her work is always a bold experiment with colours, vividly exploding on the canvas forming a ‘beautiful chaos’, bursting beyond the boundaries of paintings.

 “Other colours, other air, other life values and reality are more intriguing than fiction, this is my artistic world,” says the contemporary artist.   

“These are incredible works, you have to see them, live through them…,” they say of Lina Smal’s pieces, “she has an incredible talent for engaging her viewers into her truly magnificent art.” Lina Smal is an art director, producer and image artist.

We immerse ourselves in the exhibition as if walking down the street looking into the faces of the people around us. There we see ourselves, or a reflection of our own images, separated only by time. What are our emotions at the moment of learning about ourselves and others? How long are we willing to live like this, in our own illusory world, before we want to start asking questions? Lina’s pieces encourage us to look for answers about our path, our destiny and our strengths in life or maybe, on the contrary, about our weaknesses.

Another artist who is now attracting a growing audience is Lesia Bukaitis. For Bukaitis, a former investment banker, art is primarily about finding herself and exploring and learning about the world around us.

Lesya finds inspiration in the smallest details and her vision of beauty is unique and fascinating. Try to walk the streets of a new city. What will you notice and what remains hidden to you? You have to wonder why. Or just look at Lesya’s work and feel the happiness of discovering a new world with her, experience the sunbeams playing bright colors in the glass of houses passing by.