Artist Natalya Nesterova is one of the most famous and best-selling contemporary Russian artists in Russia and the West, especially in the United States, where she began working in the 1980s. From a Moscow family of architects, the granddaughter of the artist Nikolai Nesterov, she graduated from the Surikov State Academic Art Institute, in the class of artist Dmitry Zhilinsky. Her paintings are kept in the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne and others. The most prominent representative of the artists in the seventies, she was also influenced by the art of primitivists, in particular the artist Nikolai Pirosmani. In her works, you can find references to the mannerist artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo, known for his portraits using flowers and fruits, as well as to the subjects of Pieter Brueghel. Her painting is characterized by bright colors, graphic manner of depiction, simplified compositions, and theatricality.
Despite the seeming simplicity and naivety of her artistic language, Nesterova’s images are filled with serious philosophical content. For the artist, primitivism is a means that helps to achieve the immediacy of the depicted.
Natalya Nesterova’s 1997 painting ‘The Portrait’ from the collection of the Tarusa Art Gallery is one of a series of works with identical subjects that she created in the late 1990s. It depicts a person turned in profile. You can distinguish his clothes - a blue suit and a hat decorated with fruits, but it is impossible to determine his facial features and age. Details like this are not important. Here is a collective image of a contemporary, lonely and lost in a difficult time. The decoration in the form of fruit brings an element of grotesque and unreality to the image. The paint layer is applied with generous strokes, which are mixed into new shades already on the canvas - in this way the artist achieves three-dimensional images. The rich blue color, so beloved by Nesterova, attracts the viewer’s attention to a lonely figure, emphasizes the calm and stillness of the image.
He is dressed in a blue suit, on his head is a hat decorated with fruits, which produces both a comic effect and the impression of a fantastic event. Facial features, as well as age and gender, are difficult to determine, but this is not required - this is not a portrait of a specific person, but rather a collective image of a contemporary. There is nothing around the person except the grayish-brown earth and the cloudy sky in the background. Echoes of the theme of loneliness of a modern person are clearly manifested here. A special accent - a color spot in the composition - is the blue color of the suit, which stands out against the background of the dull color of the background.
Natalia Nesterova’s creative style is very recognizable and individual. Her extraordinary and multifaceted work is characterized by many complex semantic constructions by simple artistic means. The theme of human loneliness is one of the main themes in the work of Nesterova. Each figure is a separate, unrelated unit. The artist never observed the strict framework of genre canons. Among her favorite themes were sketches of urban and resort life, images of people walking around the city or having a rest at the sea. In her later work, Nesterova turns to religious themes. The artist’s technique is expressive, she creates sculptural modeling of forms using pasty and accented strokes without glazing.
Despite the seeming simplicity and naivety of her artistic language, Nesterova’s images are filled with serious philosophical content. For the artist, primitivism is a means that helps to achieve the immediacy of the depicted.
Natalya Nesterova’s 1997 painting ‘The Portrait’ from the collection of the Tarusa Art Gallery is one of a series of works with identical subjects that she created in the late 1990s. It depicts a person turned in profile. You can distinguish his clothes - a blue suit and a hat decorated with fruits, but it is impossible to determine his facial features and age. Details like this are not important. Here is a collective image of a contemporary, lonely and lost in a difficult time. The decoration in the form of fruit brings an element of grotesque and unreality to the image. The paint layer is applied with generous strokes, which are mixed into new shades already on the canvas - in this way the artist achieves three-dimensional images. The rich blue color, so beloved by Nesterova, attracts the viewer’s attention to a lonely figure, emphasizes the calm and stillness of the image.
He is dressed in a blue suit, on his head is a hat decorated with fruits, which produces both a comic effect and the impression of a fantastic event. Facial features, as well as age and gender, are difficult to determine, but this is not required - this is not a portrait of a specific person, but rather a collective image of a contemporary. There is nothing around the person except the grayish-brown earth and the cloudy sky in the background. Echoes of the theme of loneliness of a modern person are clearly manifested here. A special accent - a color spot in the composition - is the blue color of the suit, which stands out against the background of the dull color of the background.
Natalia Nesterova’s creative style is very recognizable and individual. Her extraordinary and multifaceted work is characterized by many complex semantic constructions by simple artistic means. The theme of human loneliness is one of the main themes in the work of Nesterova. Each figure is a separate, unrelated unit. The artist never observed the strict framework of genre canons. Among her favorite themes were sketches of urban and resort life, images of people walking around the city or having a rest at the sea. In her later work, Nesterova turns to religious themes. The artist’s technique is expressive, she creates sculptural modeling of forms using pasty and accented strokes without glazing.
