Natalya Nesterova
Hat with Bird, colorful, figurative
2017

About the Item

A colorful painting depicting the profile of a girl standing by the ocean on the sand. She is wearing a blue hat with two yellow birds resting on her hat. Oil on canvas Natalya Nesterova, a figurative artist, became a member of the Artists’ Union of the USSR in 1969, a short year after graduating from Moscow’s Surikov Art Institute. She was soon considered a leading member of the left wing of the Union, and at age twenty-two took part in the exhibits of the Young Moscow Artists. Creating works in a figurative primitivist manner while often depicting grotesque imagery, Nesterova was sometimes accused of undermining the foundations of Russian professional artistic training. The appeal and popularity of her work seemed only enhanced by such critiques. Nesterova returns often to the theme of fate and enlightenment with religious connotations and elements of theater. At the opening of her major 1992 retrospective at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Nesterova was asked to explain the meaning of her works. In halting English, she explained that she wants the viewer to find their own meaning in her work.

Creator:

Natalya Nesterova (1944 - 2022, Russian)

Creation Year:

2017

Dimensions:

Height: 24.02 in (61 cm)Width: 18 in (45.7 cm)

Medium:

Oil,Canvas

Period:

2010-

Condition:

Gallery Location:

New York, NY

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU150827768142

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Born in Moscow in 1944 in a family of architects. In 1962-1968, she studied at the Moscow State Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov with the famous painter, professor Dmitry Zhilinsky. Natalia Nesterova remained one of the most recognized seventies masters. The Fatherland did not deprive her of her awards and titles: State Prize, Triumph Prize, the title of Honored Artist of the Russian Federation, the title of academician and the Honorary Gold Medal of the Academy of Arts. Since 1991 she is a professor of painting at the Russian Academy of Arts. Since 1988, the artist has mostly lived in the United States. She has participated in over sixty individual and group exhibitions at home and abroad. Her paintings are stored in major collections: in the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, the Museum of Oriental Art, the Cosmonautics Museum, the Pleiades Museum, in the collection of Art Modern galleries, the Moscow Palette, MARS (Moscow), in 39 museums of the CIS countries, as well as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Art Museum (Warsaw), collection of Peter Ludwig (Cologne, Aachen), Art Museum (Seoul), Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, Art Museum (Poznan), Oklahoma Museum, Hal Brom Gallery, Art Museum (Tallinn ), Maya Paul Gallery Lsky (Chicago), private collections in the USA, Europe, America, Asia, Estonia. Her paintings can be described as genre, filled with satirical pathos. Favorite subjects - festive and idle celebrations, pesky rest on the seashore, aimless walks around the city, endless playing cards, many hours of sitting in a cafe. The faces on her canvases often look like masks, the figures froze in artificial mannequin poses, and things in ridiculous positions. Recognizable and topographically authentic city landscapes turn into a fake space, where mise-en-scenes from the theater of the absurdity are played out with false ambiguity. The anti-heroes of Nesterov’s canvases languish with boredom, loneliness and the meaninglessness of their existence, they are empty and hectic. These are the inhabitants of the last Soviet period.