Kristina Strunkova

MFA 2020

Painting

aksentova.com

My works are reflections on time, I ask myself how important it is for me to maintain 

the identity of the bearer of that time and culture, the era I belong to, how to strike a balance 

between sensuality and crude irony, a sense of nostalgia and a pragmatically planned future 

setting? I observe that visual memory for me is one of the most powerful postulates of my 

being. 

In my works I turn more and more to the topic of memory. Childhood memories and 

personal experiences are fundamental markers of my visual discourse. Observations – as the 

foundation recreated on canvas embodied in a narrative. 

I practice materials that I used in childhood, based on water (children in Russia 

traditionally begin to paint with watercolors). 

It’s important for me to immerse the viewer in a special atmosphere, to evoke a 

sincere feeling of the experience, to point to certain markers of the era, accompanied by a 

sense of nostalgia and melancholy. 

Consciousness constantly encourages us to reflect on the theme of the beauty and the 

ugliness, human complexes, relationships and experiences, my characters are not always 

concretized, they are imaginative, leaving a field for reflection, compassion, sympathy and 

sometimes even joy. They are endowed with hypertrophied traits, they are grotesque, they are 

characterized by phantasmagoria, hyperbole. 

The feeling of incompleteness, sometimes even frivolity, understatedness of the work 

gives me a sense of freedom.

CV – Kristina Strunkova

"The figure is nothing unless you can twist it around like a strange miracle."

Willem De Kooning

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