Anna Kazmina

Russian Contemporary Art by Anna Kazmina - Transformation. The Life of Elephants

2023

Anna Kazmina is a Russian artist born in 1987 who lives between Moscow, Russia, and Beijing, China. She graduated from the Department of Art, at Moscow State University, and got a Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Beijing Normal University. She is a member of the Russian Artists’ Union. She participated at the Moscow Blazar Youth Art Fair, was awarded the first prize winner of the Titian International Prize of the Beijing Academy of Art, has been nonmined of the Moscow Zverev Art Prize, and attended the Beijing Biennale, as well as many exhibitions in China and Russia. Anna Kazmina’s artworks provoke us to think about the philosophical questions of memory, time, creativity process, consciousness, and subconsciousness. Also, her artworks focus on human nature itself, as well as all the complex inner relationships between Humans and Reality. The creative process for the artist becomes an ideal condition to get behind the scenes of aestheticized modernity and gets to rethink the inner essence of things and expand the potential knowledge of the world. Anna’s artworks show a desire to break free from the shackles of commercialism’s images imposed by society and other kinds of stereotypes that make paintings transcendent: recover the hidden possibilities of human beings, and things and find their interactions with each other. Working in painting, graphics, sculpture, video, installations, and other mediums, Anna combines and collides with different logic and approaches. She moves from focusing on a small scale to a large one and captures a variety of different meaning structures into the concentrated single thought space. By connecting the multiplicity of the elements, objects are transformed into organic structures, similar to centuries of minerals, where the universe and humans are transformed into a single complex organism. For example, particles of light and color, sounds, objects, natural phenomenon animal life, and the world of people in Anna’s works are in perpetual motion and connection, permanently building the improvement of the world. Here, metaphysics interacts constantly, is inextricably linked to physics, and materials are indivisibly linked to thought. The artist, as an alchemist looking for his precious element, produces all kinds of interactions with materials or more concretely, precisely, finds contact and dialogue with the materials. We will see crashed porcelains patterns, crumpling drawings, tearing existing images, cutting off many layers of paint, melting and sculpting new configurations, happening mechanical and human-machines technical symbiosis. For example, Anna processes already completed drawings of her by converting them into pixels via photography and a computer, then she accepts to make various changes to them with very sensual textures: prints with manual hatching and very brightly colorful artificial plants, scattered QR codes and thick pasty paint strokes.