Global Research Institute

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Andrews Gallery is pleased to present Vera Iliatova’s solo exhibition entitled Oblivion Revisited.

A lecture by the artist followed by a reception will take place on Thursday September, 12 from 4:30pm to 6:30pm.

“MEMORY EXISTS OUTSIDE OF TIME”, said Vera Iliatova. In her large scale paintings of dramatic female scenes, Iliatova reminisces of a time that doesn’t actually exist, creating moments that exist outside of temporal reality. 10 cinematic compositions examine the inner worlds of women – or perhaps the many facets of a single woman – in a dichotomy of large and small, as mundane interactions are emphasized by memory. But what aspects of our memories are factual? Sometimes sharpened by nostalgia and sometimes muddied by pain, Iliatova’s work asks us to enter a subjectivist world through one woman’s story of emigrating from the Soviet Union. 

Andrews Gallery presents a survey on the career of Vera Iliatova, an internationally renowned artist and professor at New York’s Sarah Lawrence College. Considering film and fashion photography among her key influences, Iliatova’s work is a meditation on the “materiality” of “memory and the process of dreaming.” Though she does not consider her work purely autobiographical, motifs throughout the survey recall scenes from Iliatova’s own childhood in Saint Petersburg and her nostalgia for what life could have been like without the corruption in her home country. In her paintings, Iliatova blurs these lines between the real and the perceived, just as how, in memory, the wrinkles of our environment are smoothed out. One will notice the presence of almost exclusively feminine figures in Iliatova’s paintings. As many feminist critics have pointed out, and as she would agree herself, the “female drama” is as much a key aspect of Iliatova’s work as landscape or color. 

Through this survey, we catch glimpses of the pivotal scenes in a woman’s life. But while the figures are small and clustered together, their world is big, reminding us that this is just one moment in a sea of time, one moment in a lifetime of stories. 

Vera Iliatova is currently represented by the Natalie Karg gallery in New York City, which describes her as “a luminary of contemporary art.” She received her MFA in printmaking from Yale University and has gone on to exhibit on both sides of the Atlantic, earning her the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting in 2018. When she is creating, Iliatova can be found in her studio nestled deep in the Catskill Mountains, where she is preparing for three exhibitions of new work, two in New York and one in Madrid.

Sponsored by: Art and Art History

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