PHOTOGRAPHIE 11/2020

News from Katerina Belkina
THE SUM OF ALL PARTS

Leonardo da Vinci devoted himself to measuring people as early as 1492 with his Vitruvian man. In addition, he endeavored to devote himself anatomically to the innermost part of the human being. Katerina Belkina continues on this path. Wants to penetrate even deeper: into the psyche. She is her own subject.

Katerina Belkina was born into an artistic family and grew up in Samara in south-eastern European Russia. The approach to art was therefore predetermined and broke ground in her passion for painting, which she still transfers into her pictorial creations today. She doesn't like to call them photographs, nor does she call herself a photographer. The processing in the post-production with the virtual paintbrush turns out to be too intense, which transports her motifs into the hyper-real – of course also in terms of content through her visions. But why the image creators' reference to a time when the Middle Ages gave way to modern times? “It wasn't necessarily the Dutch Renaissance that concerned me… We grew up with art history, studying it and its works. The Renaissance as an epoch was the most present throughout my education. Contemporary art as a category was completely absent in the Soviet Union,” the artist, who now lives near Berlin, recalls in her illustrated book with an artistic discourse, an interview and her own text, which is currently being published. “... The Soviet aesthetic was very rigid and had a restrictive framework, so anything not directly related to it always interested me very much. Then the era changed, the Soviet era ended, and the post-Soviet era began. This also had its consequences, because we suddenly had access to contemporary art, western magazines and books. I was particularly fascinated by the photography. ... It was love at first sight.” Restrictions accompanied Katerina her whole life: In the old Soviet Union, as a female artist and in her urban two-room apartment, which she also repeatedly incorporates into her art: “A two-room apartment is not just the most common form of city dwelling, but represents ...

"Fly!" Here Katerina Belkina stages an enraptured state of mind against the background of an ordinary city backdrop. She elevates the woman through the light to a "divine" appearing being. And again it is the hands that play an essential role in the expression of the whole motif.

"The Road". Belkina invites us on the back seat of her car for a ride through her (our?) world. What does her look want to tell us?

"Constant". One's own life story, from which one emerges, is a constant. A mother's love and care for the eternal child can also be a constant. In typical Katerina Belkina style, “Constant” combines Renaissance painting with the pictorial language of socialist realism.

„11 Milliliter per Minute“. The cover motif of the illustrated book in the original: a self-portrait.