Evgeniya Dudnikova
A STAR IS BORN IN THE CLOUD
A solo exhibition in the Triumph gallery
Curated by Polina Mogilina
We used to love the year-end suns, the narrow
plains where our gazes flowed like those raging
rivers of our childhood. Now there's nothing but
reflections in these woods restocked with absurd
animals and well-known plants.
André Breton, Philippe Soupault.
The Magnetic Fields (1919)
Evgeniya Dudnikova's exhibition A Star Is Born in the Cloud is a truly remarkable journey into the world of enchanting phantasmagoria conceived by the artist's imagination. Her works open doors into shimmering spaces, sprinkled with radiant stars and brilliant carpeting of wildflowers. While, at first glance, Evgeniya Dudnikova’s paintings may seem either stories from a fairy tale or fantastical dreams, they actually turn out to be portals into parallel worlds, woven together from metaphors, symbols, and creatures. The artist depicts fragments of the spiritual world unconstrained by the physical laws of the material world, where the latter is a mere projection of the former. In the space constructed by the artist, the membrane that separates the real world from the otherworld is so thin and elusive that the viewer can go back and forth all the time.
Artworks by Evgeniya Dudnikova are marked by the depth and complexity of the meanings, judgements and signs contained therein. In each work she contemplates the nature of things and looks for interrelations between objects. The rich abundance of images, combined into constellations, is a distinctive feature of Dudnikova’s style, alike to the surrealist techniques. Her images mostly deal directly with nature, emerging from it or producing new lifeforms. The artist’s profound connection with nature dates as far back as her childhood that she spent in the famous village of Kratovo, surrounded by forests and their dwellers. The attachment to wild nature, travelling and intense observation of the elements and natural phenomena have now become an integral part of her creative practice as well as personal identity. Moving left to right from painting to painting, the viewer experiences in sequential order, on the one hand, a day from early morning to deep night and, on the other, all seasons of the year from spring to winter. The loop is closed not only through the sequence of the stories as presented, but also through colour and tone. All paintings are augmented with short curatorial notes that unfold into a parallel plotline to expand the audience's sensual experience. Although a single ecosystem, each artwork at this exhibition is a self-contained story that stands on its own. Composing the works, Evgeniya combines colourful unique images into puzzles, and if you undertake to solve them, you may gain insight into the essence of things or may come up with your own version of reality.
Poling Mogilina
The well of dream
Wood, ceramic, acrylic
2023
Well of dream and River of time installation
Paintings
Morning
130x130 cm
Oil on canvas
2023
The entire world is submerged into dreaming: silent, measured, thick Infused with the scents of flowering, the air got filed with light, became transparent and frothy. Not a single sound is to be heard during this hour before dawn — only the slipping seconds are falling and landing on flower petals that are bobbing calmly. Yet, in this milky fog blanketing the blossoming field as a thick humid cloud there is already new life, Weightless, like insect wings. There is not a more fragile moment than this petrified pre-dawn silence.
PM
Morning on the forest lake
130x130 cm
Oil on canvas
2023
Dashing like a flash, the rising sun pierced through the flufly tree branches. Clinking like gold ring armour it made its onset confidently, conquering the earth and subjecting each millimetre: In this air, resonant with tension, two souls met — different like day and night, fire and water, the desperate and the delicate, From their different poles of the universe, they stepped with confidence toward each other; drawing in air with their loud nostrils to sense and forever commit to memory each other's scents.
PM
Morning after the storm
150x200 cm
Oil on canvas
2023
People used to think they had explored and understood the world completely that all discoveries had been made, that anything that happened was governed by laws and formulas. So arrived the thunderstorm, followed by doubts and premonitions of something greater, beyond any control by reason. A flash of lightning — a moment! Beautiful and evanescent, almost elusive. Seconded by thunder that tears up the swollen clouds, with entitlement and ruthlessness. The voice of the elements is formidable, a reminder of its force. Nothing is able to resist, the only option is to obey. Peace is established in the greenery, its thirst quenched, just the sound of raindrops on the leaves. Here, in the thick, hidden under leaves and flowers, like a swarm of moths, magic happens. And its fragrance spreads for many kilometres out.
PM
Observer
150x200 cm
Oil on canvas
2023
In the gradients of the rainbow, moments of time splatter like tiny fish. Gleaming in the sun with all refracted colours, giggling and chasing each other: Their movements, as if, in dance, contain patterns and unseen mechanisms that facilitate quiet, barely audible music moving along like the wind. Individual rays chirp, bouncing on wavy clouds, fluffy like dandelion heads. The world is spinning, but time has no effect here, or maybe it's just there is all the time in the world. This air is woven from memories of the past and the future. The moments that make up life.
PM
The garden prepared to sleep
130x130 cm
Oil on canvas
2022
The air is trembling with excitement at the end of summer: The garden still bears the savoury scents of late flowers, anxious insects buzz around, and the sun-warmed earth still holds some heat. But there are gusts of cool breeze coming from somewhere, and the tree canopies are coloured bright — as if a hurry to experience this time through to its very conclusion, to their last breath. Life explodes in incredible colours of the warmest hues. Desperate throbbing beauty unfolds everywhere, in every remote comer: But slowly and truly, the damp fluffy clouds are thickening. The sky frowns faintly, yawns wearily, and slowly prepares to spill the first drops of autumn onto the earth.
PM
Meditating deer
150x120 cm
Oil on canvas
2022
Miracle inhabits quietly the simplest things: a nightingale’s song in the night silence, warm sea waves at dawn, forest standing still right before a thunderstorm, D-shaped rainbows on the horizon, the first bud to blossom after winter, dew on ample meadow flowers. Under the clear-sky dome, having escaped the hassle and arduous rumination, you will find him between the branches of flowering cherry trees, at the very edge of the horizon under the fiery sunset sky, in the high-pitched murmur of a mountain stream, in the faint ‘twinkle of distant stars. This encounter — short-lived and one-of-a-kind — is as fragile as a bee's wing.
PM
Heavenly horses
150x120 cm
Oil on canvas
2023
How many times did you, looking at the clouds floating by above, think that there might be someone living in them? Did you ever see any figures moving across the sky behind the dense woolly white? What if your eyes weren't deceiving you? Perhaps these were figures of galloping horses, trotting between the clouds, highlighted by the golden sunlight? Free and grand, they bathed in streams of sunlight and breathed in the spring-soaked air avidly, with loud nostrils, Above them stretched the endless azure sky, sprinkled with fragments of dreams. As if ghostly nomads, they galloped between worlds, leaving behind only a trace of flickering light and iridescent glow.
PM
On the wings of the eight winds
150x200 cm
Oil on canvas
2022
The sea in these dreams is not billions of litres of salt water ‘trapped in a sandy reservoir It is a multi-faced living thing that moves, thinks, and breathes. Capable of consuming the entire world, yet, it barely moves in its sleep, as if in the deepest of slumbers. Unbearably palpable, more realistic and tangible than anything else. Deep at the bottom of the cold dark waters, it guards all the secrets of the world, tt whispers in ancient tongues about the essence of things, but the words that reach its surface are swiftly carried away with wind.
PM
Portal in the Eastern wall
150x200 cm
Oil on canvas
2022
Sat at the intersection of all realities, everything in this world was different. The shimmering holographic sky had the stars swayed in silence — cold and pointy, like diamonds of pure ice — while the sun shined in neon light. The air was translucent mist, thick but clear like clouds that came down from the sky. The smell of apples, wet grass, and incense was all around, and the waves licked the shore like quicksilver: it seemed a daydream — a dream too real, penultimately fantastical, but completely free from any anxiety and fear: Love reigned here unconditionally, absorbing everything that be and filling it with the light of the stars.
PM
Fire spirits
150x150 cm
Oil on canvas
2023
The sun was inevitably sliding towards the horizon, flooding everything with the gold of last light, making all colours even stronger, as if kindled by the ecstasy of emotion. Golden dust precipitated on the Earth's surface in precious embroidery, sending reflections on the colourful gems-like buds. highly dramatic point, that moment made the heart race in anxious dread of the end, it seemed the sun would go forever, would bur up from its own heat, submerging the Earth into cosmic darkness, And every living thing tries desolately to experience this moment in full et it inebriate them into oblivion, gulping on the air infused with heated aromas. Each time the sun dies, only to return the next morning with gentle rays of dawn and revive the momentarily orphaned planet This is the cycle of life that contains the universal harmony that penetrates every cell.
PM
Star people
150x120 cm
Oil on canvas
2022
Just once in every million years, at the very tail-end of the day, did the inhabitants of distant stars gather around the source. They took a long, long time to fly from different comers of the universe — at that twilight hour when the throbbing fabric of reality gets so thin that it is possible to travel between worlds — in order to meet again and experience the unity of their souls. They shimmered in the oncoming darkness with billions of stardust particles stuck onto their bodies and garments, Although brief, this encounter was much coveted. In that short moment, their loneliness dissolved in warm friendly embrace and in quietly told stories of the pulsating beauty of distant luminaries.
PM
Second sky
200x150 cm
Oil on canvas
2022
At night, in the glistening haze of the Milky Way, under a scattershot of constellations, hidden from strange eyes, there roam horses. Graceful, otherworldly they wander unhurried in the radiant milk of the clouds, gathering nectar: Their movements are smooth and graceful, like the movements of celestial luminaries. They daydream, see the dreams of others and snoring softly from time to time, tell each other about them.
PM
House by the ocean
150x150 cm
Oil on canvas
2023
What could be more sincere than a solitary dance in the cold light of the moon and stars? Flowing movements with no clear direction, guided only by an impulse. The music in your head echoing the flickering embers in the grate and leads the dancer after the moonlight. There is so much emotion contained in this movement, so much drive. In that moment, time stops, freezes, and the world beyond the walls of the room seems to simply not exist. Only the music and starlight in the thick of night sky.
PM
Star library
130x130 cm
Oil on canvas
2022
What could be more sincere than a solitary dance in the cold light of the moon and stars? Flowing movements with no clear direction, guided only by an impulse. The music in your head echoing the flickering embers in the grate and leads the dancer after the moonlight. There is so much emotion contained in this movement, so much drive. In that moment, time stops, freezes, and the world beyond the walls of the room seems to simply not exist. Only the music and starlight in the thick of night sky.
PM
Night mystery
130x130 cm
Oil on canvas
2022
What could be more sincere than a solitary dance in the cold light of the moon and stars? Flowing movements with no clear direction, guided only by an impulse. The music in your head echoing the flickering embers in the grate and leads the dancer after the moonlight. There is so much emotion contained in this movement, so much drive. In that moment, time stops, freezes, and the world beyond the walls of the room seems to simply not exist. Only the music and starlight in the thick of night sky.
PM
Fragments
Figures 1-10
From the Star people series
Chamotte, glaze, hand modeling
2023
Sculptures in the exhibition space
June — 9 July 2023
TRIUMPH GALLERY
Emeliyan Zakharov, Dmitry Khankin, Vera Kryuchkova, Olga Kovacheva,
Marina Bobyleva, Mikhail Martkovich, Kristina Romanova, Grigory Melekestsew, Valentina Kheraskova, Alexey Shervashidze, Vladimir Churanov, Polina Mogiina, Alexandra Vysotskaya, Artur Knyazev, Maria Savelyeva, Anastasia Dymova, Konstantin Mania, Inessa Zhuravleva, Alexandra Golda, Alisa Prokhorova, Polina Kotova, Georgy Churanov, Nikolay Molok Jnr, Anna Talalaeva, Alexandra Dymova, Alexandra Kristina Portilla lzral, Maria Rshtuni, Ivan Repkin, Semyon Eruntsov, Alina Shcherbakova
Emeliyan Zakharov, Dmitry Khankin, Vera Kryuchkova, Olga Kovacheva,
Marina Bobyleva, Mikhail Martkovich, Kristina Romanova, Grigory Melekestsew, Valentina Kheraskova, Alexey Shervashidze, Vladimir Churanov, Polina Mogiina, Alexandra Vysotskaya, Artur Knyazev, Maria Savelyeva, Anastasia Dymova, Konstantin Mania, Inessa Zhuravleva, Alexandra Golda, Alisa Prokhorova, Polina Kotova, Georgy Churanov, Nikolay Molok Jnr, Anna Talalaeva, Alexandra Dymova, Alexandra Kristina Portilla lzral, Maria Rshtuni, Ivan Repkin, Semyon Eruntsov, Alina Shcherbakova
Curator
Polina Mogiina
Polina Mogiina
Texts
Polina Mogiina
Polina Mogiina
Translation
Fedor Makhlayuk
Fedor Makhlayuk
Photo
Evgeniya Dudnikova, Varvara Toplennikova
