With a cold yet sensual and cleverly critical aesthetic, photographer Katerina Belkina reinterprets works of the past, regardless of their nature—pious, decorative, moral, utopian, ideological, or nonsensical (often not mutually exclusive). This demonstrates that no artist can bypass the figures of the past. She imbues them with a frosty eroticism or second-degree humor, crafting a joyful disillusionment to highlight their inherent strangeness.
Her photography keeps an acute awareness of the past alive through interventions that twist and disrupt the original works while inventing a new visual language. The stagings distort and unsettle the original compositions, leaving them unbalanced. However, Belkina does not seek the dramatic invention of major irregularities in visual language. Instead, she operates with poetic subtlety, reshaping foundational structures to create a kind of soft yet effective cruelty, far from any aggressive verbosity. Her photography might seem "universal" if not for her uniquely thoughtful reinterpretations. She amplifies the enigma of painting, simultaneously clarifying and deepening it. By reconfiguring relationships, her work gives painting, regardless of its era or origin, a new pictorial dimension through photography.
