Term: May ’25 – July ’25
“My practice is structured around the existential experience of the national past and I employ the medium of painting to access it. I use found old photographs, which I enlarge and transfer onto canvas to paint over them, speculatively inserting my presence in the scenes they contain.
I’ve always found old, mundane photos of typical family life fascinating. They provide a window into daily life of the other times I could not witness, and let us see people who do not exist anymore, whose personal life stories did not go into history books – especially if they were women, working class, ethnical or racial minorities. I feel a strong protest against the fact that these memories gets completely erased by some big narratives and big, mostly male names.
At some point discovered that when I paint over the enlarged photographs, I get unprecedented energy to my brushwork. I feel the urge to climb into this moment of precious lost history, insert myself in it, and interact with the characters, and that fuels my painting. The large scale of my works allows me to see them as a portal, now just a window into that life in the past, and my spontaneous colour choices and wide gestures allow me to manifest my material presence in them. I seek to disrupt the linear spatial perspective of the photograph, I mix the foreground and background into a single pictorial mass of slimy paint, like memories from old age become just a mass with some sparkles.”
insta: @katyagranova
