Triumph Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Anna Stavinozhenko titled "The Forest Behind the Wall." Anna graduated from the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design and is currently studying Contemporary Painting at Higher School of Economics. In her work, the artist turns to the theme of everyday life and explores the nature of the relationship between the natural and the social worlds.

Anna Stavinozhenko
Leaves and lamps
2024
Canvas, acrylic
120×200 cm

Triumph Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Anna Stavinozhenko titled "The Forest Behind the Wall." Anna graduated from the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design and is currently studying Contemporary Painting at Higher School of Economics. In her work, the artist turns to the theme of everyday life and explores the nature of the relationship between the natural and the social worlds.

Anna depicts living spaces that function as shelters from external upheavals while simultaneously conveying a sense of disconnection. She integrates fragments of landscape into these interiors, layering real and imaginary objects, locations, and images, while deliberately excluding explicit markers of the present day. Elements of flora that would be unlikely to coexist in nature fill houses and rooms, concealing their inhabitants and traces of human presence. On the one hand, they evoke a sense of solastalgia—a longing for what has been lost—and thus serve as a reminder of events that have transformed the environment. On the other, they symbolize processes related to personal memory, its instability, and its mutability.

Moving through the exhibition, the viewer encounters various spaces and their fragments, as if captured by a camera. In contemporary reality, where nature is increasingly accessed through screens, devices shape both the means of recording and the way we perceive the world around us. As a result, nature becomes intertwined with its images and with both false and genuine memories of it. The exhibition offers an observation of the properties of memory—its fluidity and instability—while drawing attention to ways of interacting with the environment and with time.

Curator: Marina Bobyleva