Alchemizing Exile: Part One—The Artists I’ve Lived With and the Windows That I’ve Opened

I grew up in the Soviet Union, where artistic freedom was repressed. My parents were dissidents and art-lovers. My imagination was stimulated by forbidden freedom, and I have been painting since I can remember myself. When I turned twelve, I started taking classes with dissident artists, and at the age of seventeen, I was already part of the Moscow underground artistic life.

In 1989, I came to America as a political refugee where I had to learn everything from the beginning. I had to struggle hard to shape my new personal and artistic identity. That was the moment when my art became intrinsically connected to my life, so much so that I have the impression that every brush stroke in my work is somehow an episode from my life. My biographical story, informed by a life-going introspection about lost identity and otherness, the search for belonging and the journey from Common Place to Foreign Land, lies at the core of my work.

The “Transplanted” series focuses on narratives of me cohabiting, visiting, or waiting for famous artists. By inserting myself into the painting, I point out the irony of living with an artist’s work and subjecting myself to their influence, while, at the same time, it is I who determine how much space is between us, as I appropriate what the artist may have been reluctant to give. I use historical research to choose vistas or scenes of domestic life from the artists’ eras, into which I subtly insert myself. “Who are you,” an artist might say. “I am Alexandra, your friend and confidant. I have primed your canvas and got your palate ready. You were just about to say?”

When I was a teenager in the 1980s in Moscow, everything felt full of hopes and dreams. Many underground movements developed at that time. Gorbachev wanted not to overturn the Soviet system but to loosen its grip in public life. He hoped glasnost would promote healthy criticism and perestroika would help the system work better. Instead, he opened Pandora’s box. The trickle of mild criticism he expected swelled to a torrent of pent-up frustration, especially from artists who had previously been forced underground. 

There were state-run galleries where the party controlled what could be exhibited and even controlled the supplies of materials to artists. Official art steered clear of subversive messages. This policy excluded everything abstract, surreal, or erotic. The communist party held that artists had to be engineers of the soul and serve the cause of building the community utopia. The art of socialist realism at its most didactic gave us nothing but happy workers, tireless farmers, and heroic portraits of Lenin. Until the late 1980s, underground art was only exhibited in the artists’ own crowded apartments.

I hadn’t learned English in Russia because I was stubborn. But I had to learn English and go step-by-step from Pasadena City College to figure out where to go next. I had read books about modern American art and concluded that if I wanted to be a real artist in America, I had to go to New York. I found a program that was part of State University of New York called Studio Semester, located in New York City. The program connected me to galleries and I met artists, but I couldn’t figure out how to stay in New York.

I had a smallish studio space on the Lower East Side with no heat and pieces of plywood on broken windows. But it didn’t bother me. I thought that’s how American dreams are built. I was wrong. Cold, starvation, solitude, and depression are not necessary conditions for pursuing your American artistic dream. It was more about surviving for quite a while. And I survived.

When it comes to art, I’m comfortable being uncomfortable. It’s part of how I work. If everything is too clear, I will change it or give myself another assignment just to make things more interesting. Or I will work with another artist or another creative person such as a musician or a writer to do something else. This is important, otherwise how will we grow?

In the Soviet Union, the word “rules” meant something like a straitjacket. Public and private lives were governed by unbreakable rules of the political regime. Not all of these rules had to be broadcast. They were felt as much as seen or heard. In the communal apartments where we lived, privacy was excluded from objective reality. There was no such thing as “the sacred right to privacy” as we know it in liberal western contexts. We longed for privacy, but we couldn’t have it. How is it then ok to break the privacy of an object or subject? 

For years I had been looking at a certain painting, hating its right side while liking the left one. A few years ago, I took it, covered the right side with light grey paint and got scared. This painting existed in and of itself. What right did I have to subvert its balance, to invade its inner workings? And yet I did. I gave myself the freedom to transgress.

My work brings together my own illusions and displacements. I embrace them and I play with them. Any imagination of the future has become inextricably linked to the recovery of my past.

A story told inside my paintings is always in transition: something is happening in the painting that, once finished, will change the course of things: birds are flying away, snow is falling, and an alarm clock is ringing. These paintings are narratives of totally regular things and objects being totally in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes they are funny; sometimes they are sad. We often don’t realize how important an experience is until it’s gone. I want my art to be like a well-worn military wool blanket that gives you warmth, love, and history, but with a rough surface.

Works and Comments

Click to see full-size images.

I don’t think I find the right color; I allow colors to find me. Paint floats and has its own mind based on subject matter, technique, materials, time, space. It is alive for me, and my goal is to allow it to grow up (like a plant) and only later—some time in the middle of the painting process—start changing it, based on my instinct, ideas, and goals. Each painting is different.

In ideal world I prefer to work in the morning after two to three cups of strong black tea. Afterwards I eat good lunch and have a nap! Then work for two to three hours more. I like to feel alienated when I work. I like listening to a very loud music (something nobody will guess I do). With the schedule I have right now, I am teaching almost every day for five hours or so. I am trying to cut out pieces of time for myself and just make it work. A tight schedule became one of my art materials.

In today’s world “style” is usually a combination of many different styles and isms. In my work, liquid layers and thick abstractly painted surfaces meet familiar landscapes, and they create a liminal space where I explore the world through the mixture of autobiography, symbolism, and philosophy. I am a mix of Moscow alternative cultural scene of the 1980s (my visual vocabulary, environments, approach to a hidden metaphor are all coming from there); Painting for Painting’s Sake, Abstract Expressionism, New Image painting, Romanticism, Fauvism, and Symbolism can all be found in my work.

My favorite artists are Bruegel, Vermeer, Turner, Matisse, Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Snyder, and Frida Kahlo. My work has often been compared to that of Marc Chagall. I like his early work and am actually related to his first wife, Bella Rosenfeld (my great grandfather was her younger brother), but I don’t think that he is my main influence. However, if there is a group of artists called “Jewish Artists,” I am sure I am a part of it.

I started painting when I was five, taking classes at the Fine Art Museum in Moscow. There is a photograph taken at the dacha that my parents rented in 1977 for the summer. I am sitting at the easel looking very serious. Painting on that easel told a story the same way my work does now: there is a house in the woods and a fairytale character: Petrushka! (Petrushka is a stock character of Russian folk puppetry, known at least since 17th century). I would not be surprised if I found out about him from a Stravinsky ballet that has the same name, because may be there was not always paper, but the theater was affordable, wonderful and available. This painting has two big eyes in the sky—one of the images in my work for the last 20 years.