"Empty Spaces" is her latest series. Katerina Belkina has recreated a metropolis, an urbanized space that seems empty, artificial, and purely materialistic. A (barely) futuristic metropolis in which man always feels more and more solitary and abandoned. "In the vision of the photographer, the metropolis has shaped a new type of human," explains the Dutch gallery Lilja Zakirova, which represents the artist. The worlds the photographer traverses are multiple. While she visits a futuristic world, she also delves into memory-based stories like fairy tales. In her many photographs, she is almost always present—herself or nearly so. Katerina Belkina uses self-portraiture and digital photography to construct images that balance between the real and the dreamlike. In the stories she tells, she embodies a heroine "both recognizable and mysterious." The photographer draws inspiration from archetypal figures in fairy tales: Blue Beard, Little Red Riding Hood, The Little Mermaid, Odette, Rose Red, and Snow White. She says she is fascinated by the world of childhood: "When a child lives in a world of fairies, elves, and other unreal (or maybe real) creatures, and, as they grow up, they realize that the world around them is different from this imaginary one, they begin to create it themselves. This is how the mad ones are born... or the musicians... or the painters..." She also revisits several centuries of painting, playing with the codes of Impressionist painting or the techniques of the Surrealists. Her series "Paintings" pays tribute to prominent 20th-century artists. Among them are Edgar Degas, Frida Kahlo, Tamara de Lempicka, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Kazimir Malevitch... Born in 1974 in Samara, in the southeast of Russia, the photographer herself learned the art of painting at the Art Academy of her city before continuing her studies at the Academy of Photography in Moscow in 2000.
