Ella Kruglyanskaya’s enigmatic paintings illuminate the interplay between light and shadow, wit and artifice, in a captivating exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery.
Ella Kruglyanskaya’s self-aware paintings are on view at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, ahead of exhibitions in Basel and New York.
Ella Kruglyanskaya is a Russian-born artist and illustrator known for her vibrant and whimsical style.
Born in Moscow, she began her career as an illustrator for various publications before transitioning to fine art.
Her work often features fantastical creatures and landscapes, blending traditional techniques with modern digital tools.
Kruglyanskaya's unique aesthetic has gained international recognition, with exhibitions in galleries worldwide.
She continues to push boundaries in the art world, experimenting with new mediums and themes.
Kruglyanskaya loves lemons. They appear in several of her new paintings on display at the gallery, most memorably in Lemondrama (After Manet), where a sliced and whole lemon sits next to a knife alongside a crudely painted dead body in the background. This wry humor runs throughout Kruglyanskaya’s work, perhaps the key to her success.
Kruglyanskaya has said that she wants her paintings to feel cinematic, holding suspense, seduction, and scenery within the frame. In Everyone and Their Mortality, a sardonic memento mori depicting a skeleton among aubergines, Kruglyanskaya winks at her viewer, showing off its artifice. Beneath the aubergines and skeleton, she includes a painted ‘How to’ strip at the bottom of the frame, reminding us that we’re looking at a painting.
Several of Kruglyanskaya’s works are dialogues between drawing and painting, another referential twinkle. In Odalisque with Lute and Apples, the nude woman is a hazy scribble of lines in front of neatly painted apples and a lute, as if the complete work were incomplete.
Throughout her career, Kruglyanskaya has ruminated on the role of the artist and the role of women in particular. In Odalisque, the female nude raises questions about the history of women represented purely as objects of male desire, with Kruglyanskaya’s signature wit.
The exhibition’s titular shadows are perhaps Kruglyanskaya’s best examples of self-awareness. In paintings like Adventure (in Gray) and Shadows, she paints over her drawings with bold lines of shade, as if the frame were hanging by a nearby window. These grey strokes depict the long shadows cast by the light entering her New York studio, painting light as it falls on canvas rather than its subjects.
Here, there’s greater delicacy, if not subtlety, in ‘Shadows.’ Many of the canvases explore shadows, but all of them are self-aware. Kruglyanskaya’s presence is unignorable throughout the exhibition. We look at not at drawings but her drawings; not at light but her light.
Ella Kruglyanskaya: Shadows is at Thomas Dane Gallery until May 3, 2025.
- observer.com | Shadow, Light and Lemons: Catch Ella Kruglyanskaya in London
