LOVE THESE FIERY MOMENTS

Where are you? 2016, 120 х 120 cm, textiles, sewing, threads

Art keeps our neuroses alive, just like greenery keeps flowers. The connection between a spectator and a work of art is always charged with expectations and desires, never to be managed and fulfilled, but only reflected like Narcissus’ face in the millrace.

Tatyana Akhmetgalieva recognizes these relations up front. Works in her major technique – embroidery on canvas, consciously brutal, a kind of drawing by stitching – remind of dress turned seamy side without, loose thread and cuts with no welt. And if clothes disguise fears, self-doubt, stress, a picture turns to be its opposite and brings to the surface something normally hidden under a knitted pull-over. But this isn’t disclosure, a process leading to final truth. This is skin, publicly displayed membrane of the feeling.

In a new project of Tanya Akhmetgalieva the sinking feeling which only seldom expressed in her works, comes to the fore, and the bunch of flowers becomes its main liner – a hideout which holds images of aggressive attack, hunger, death. The suite of new canvases and video is inspired by one chapter from the “Snow Queen”, the fairy-tale by Hans Christian Andersen. Gerda comes to the house of the witch and enjoys her flower garden, gradually losing sight of searching for her brother.

Flowers in the garden are tricky: they tell stories, but every time amiss – not about things Gerda really has to learn. This flower garden can be easily perceived as a metaphor of museum or exhibition – a spectator, roaming about museum rooms where reputed chef-d’oeuvres, seemingly ready to help, talk only about themselves, feels mounting disappointment or, on the contrary, gives up to escapism.

Tanya Akhmetgalieva turns the flower garden into the exhibition, but every object-flower has to reveal bitter reality and talk about what is concealed.

Beauty is often likened to obviousness. Mathematicians speak of “beautiful proofs”; best-case novel plots and films are called “beautifully made-up”.

Tatiana Akhmetgalieva finds depth of conflict in beauty. This break-through is expressed in incredibly dense compositions, bundles of energy, explosion of texture.

A bunch of flowers as a decorative given which allows artists to show their mastery in shape and color always had its hidden agenda, and taken together with a dead bird, which gives the finishing touch to greenery constructed by Akhmetgalieva, it turns into allegory in all.

In sentimental glossary of the French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze a dead bird denotes loss of virginity, and this is actually the case of “Love these flaming moments!” project. Beauty of the white swans turns into rough air causing vertigo.

The looped fountain turns from phallic metaphor into the infinity sign, the inextricable Moebius strip. Invaders break into a quiet bunch of flowers. Or have they always been there, hidden in beauty?

Tell me what you want to tell me, 2017, 190 х 260 cm, textiles, sewing, threads

Ice game, 2016, 190 х 130 cm, textiles, sewing, threads

In five days it’s the fifth again, 2017, 190 х 130 cm, textiles, sewing, threads

Passing through walls, 2016, 190 х 130 cm, textiles, sewing, threads

Singing and shouting, 2017, 25 х 25 x 18 cm, textiles, sewing, wood, styrofoam, threads

Senseless fight, 2017, 20 х 20 x 25 cm, textiles, sewing, styrofoam, threads

Membrana #2, 2016, 50 х 50 cm, textiles, sewing, threads

Where did we stop last time? 2016, 190 х 130 cm, textiles, sewing, threads

Membrana #8, 2016, 50 х 50 cm, textiles, sewing, threads