ELLA KRUGLYANSKAYA | THE ARTIST (USING RED BLACK AND GREEN)

Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in October 2014

“Ella Kruglyanskaya paints women with agency. The scenes depicted—the creative process, social interactions between women, poses evocative of a glamorous sexuality— gesture towards the fraughtness of being a woman in the world, with bodies as sites for an unfolding drama. Yet, even as Kruglyanskaya’s colorful, voluptuous women are acted upon, they are also actors of the narrative in each of her paintings— their emotional responses are honored as the subject matter. Each painting feels both intimate and immense.

[...]

Kruglyanskaya’s paintings are ‘cartoonish,’ but the aesthetic seems to have been chosen deliberately to honor the content. What better way to demonstrate the potent physicality of women’s existence and the almost caricature-like dramas that accompany living in a female body? There seems no greater manner to acknowledge the agency of protagonists that refuse to be reduced by outside influences.”

(Emily Wells, “Ella Kruglyanskaya on Womanhood, Painting and Elena Ferrante” Cultured, 2 January 2019, online)