The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2023 Winter Visual Grant to Vera Iliatova for her upcoming solo exhibition of new paintings. at Nathalie Karg Gallery, NYC.

Vera Iliatova grew up in Leningrad (former Soviet Union), and immigrated to the United States when she was 16. She received a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University, with further study at the Skowhegan School of Art (2004) and a residency at Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation (2007/2008). In 2018, Iliatova was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting.

Iliatova’s work has been shown across the US as well in Italy, Germany, Denmark and Great Britain. Iliatova’s work was recently included in exhibitions at the Warehouse Dallas (2022), Katonah Museum (2018) and at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco (2017). Her work has been reviewed in Art Forum, Art in America, Art News, The New York Times, The Houston Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Time Out New York, hyperallergic.com and other publications. Iliatova’s work is represented by Nathalie Karg Gallery where she will hold her second solo exhibition in March 2024.

I grew up in Leningrad, Russia, and although I left at the age of fifteen, the city’s mythology became an integral part of my identity, haunting me in ways I was often unaware of. In 1991, my family defected Russia on the grounds of institutional anti semitism and received political asylum ultimately settling in Brooklyn. During this time of departing and arriving I became acutely aware of my identity.

The young women depicted in my paintings are ciphers, stand-ins, imposters and actresses. The figures perform the upheavals of adolescence and feign early adulthood. The places that they inhabit are elusive hybrid settings that mirrors the changes of modern places; whether postindustrial cities, cryptic boarding schools or suburban landscapes. These girls are me. The settings are in a sense me too and are at once literary inventions acting like real lived experiences.

Moving through the space of my paintings the viewer becomes aware of time and memory. Memory like history is handed down through objects and experiences. I use paint as a material to decipher the tropes and signals of the intergenerational trauma that I know to be myself. I persistently use selfportraiture as way to anchor images down and stabilize them. The many different depictions of myself are witnesses of back in my memory to when everything was in place. As a technical formal approach to the composition, I am able to construct deeply emotive color schemes where the figures are staged. The use of naturalism in the painting operates somewhere between the merely observational and an anxious frenzied fete galante. This is achieved through a muted tonal pallet where the color is activated for description as well as the conjuring of atmospheric feeling.

The showing of the process, the constant montaging of varied sources oscillating between observation and photographic index, plus the malaise of art historical influences, are characterizing features of my work for the past 20 years. Though I am now very much an American, I have been dreaming up my memories of Russia through the heroines that populate the severed landscapes in my paintings. Grey skies over a darkened earth, a conservatory deftly depicted to contain a private rendezvous, a stormy harbor in the background of sulky recalcitrant girls. There is a performative aspect to my process. Much of the work has a cinematic sensibility in the way it presents scenes that, while plausible, are clearly artificial and choreographed.

Please visit Vera’s Instagram and website for more information.