‘Street Art. Anna’ was painted by Irina Aroslanova in 2017. During the last decades of the 20th century the portrait genre was gradually extinguishing. Lack of the party commission led to the fact that the painters did very few portraits and were mostly focused on other genres, sometimes even the abstract ones. Everyday life in its classical artistic presentation attracted the painters less.

Irina Aroslanova is a Kurgan-based graphic artist, a painter and a teacher of the children’s art school. She works in the different genres, but manifests herself most actively as a portraitist. Having elaborated her unique approach, she works on the reflection of the inner and external image of her models in such a way creating a gallery of our contemporaries’ images.

Portrait Anna is a work from the Street Art tetralogy, which is also part of the series Kurgan in Faces. It has well-known townsmen and arty people as models (including the ones from the artist’s surrounding). Aroslanova draws the viewer’s attention to such mysterious phenomenon of the youth subculture as street art. The artists put the wall with the traces of drawings and inscriptions in street art style on the background. Irina Aroslanova managed to find very convenient models for these portraits. They were her ex students at the art school. It goes without saying that such circumstance helped the author satisfyingly and touchingly express the characters of her models and at the same time create the general types of her young contemporaries. Thas is a true success of the Kurgan painter in the portrait genre, which is going through not the easiest time in its development. Delicate psychologism of the painting, careful attention to the girl’s look makes the painting similar to the legacy of the past. However, the experimental approach to the composition, the angle, and the modernist palette make the painting extremely actual.