Olga Okuneva

Olga Okuneva is a well-known Russian artist and book-illustrator. She is a member of the Union of Artists of Russia (since 1990) and has a title of Honored Artist of Russia (1998). Etchings, litographies and drawings by Olga Okuneva are represented at numerous personal and group exhibitions all over the world.

The individual touch and a high level of associative thinking in the works of the young artist showed the scale of her talent and immediately attracted attention of art-critics and audience at the very first appearance of Olga Okuneva on the Russian arts’ horizon in the end of the 1980-s.

Henceforth, her professional growth was not subjected to sharp and unexpected changes of manner and style. Governed only by her inspirations Olga acquired more and more freedom of self-expression.

'Olga Okuneva', 1999, oil on board, 60 x 48 cm, painted by Marina Borisova

Her favorite technique is etching. She masters all its means and merits expertly. The only possible choice of manner, the refined drawing, expressive black planes, the richness and intensity of colors, the 'lacerated' borders of the list — everything serves to convey the artist’s intention.

Olga Okuneva is steadily constructing and improving her world, subjective and conventional. In her series 'The Attraction' (1988) and 'The circus has come' (1989) she herself invents the rules of the game and a theatre of her own — with a scene, a curtain and several planes of meaning. As to a spectator, —well, he should be in the hall, that is at a certain distance. But at the same time he is powerfully drawn into this world and impelled to comprehend what he has seen, to live through it. Seemingly naïve literary topic of these lists unexpectedly develops into a social drama. Okuneva is not afraid of beaten tracks: circus was always one of the favorite themes in the world art, it gave a possibility to express oneself rather openly. Olga is sure that there can be no repetition, for every artist has his own, fundamentally individual views on life.

Olga builds up her compositions in such a way that not only animals but suffering people also find themselves in cages. Is there a way out of this captivity? In the etchings 'Self-portrait', 'Anna', 'Flowers for Lena' Olga Okuneva’s heroes are trying to tear open the closed space. The constraint poses and gestures of her characters conceal inner dynamics opposing all bonds, thus creating strong emotional tension within the space of the list. The artist is balancing on the brink of a tragedy, but the beauty and harmony of the list, its refined surface, which is created by complicated combinations of manners of execution and varieties of tones, brings forth a positive effect.

In seven lists of the series 'A walk in the park' (1990) O. Okuneva is interested in a mutual penetration of living forms and urban constructions: columns of a cathedral are transformed into trees, trees grows right through the vaults, human figures blend with nature, dissolve in it. Using a metaphorical language the artist speaks about things which disturb us. Plants, animals, men are the living cells of an indivisible organism — the organism of our Planet. Every violation of the mutual balance, crushing of harmonious ties is fraught with a planetary catastrophe.

In the etching 'A sculptor and his model' the author’s thought achieves special sharpness. Inexplicable connection of an artists and his creation, his struggle with the unyielding matter are conveyed through the state of the creator himself and the space saturated with energy, where epically powerful figures of the sculptor and his model are situated.

In every next work — in the series 'Roads and bridges' (1992) or in the colored etchings 'Seasons' (1994) Olga Okuneva renders the slightest nuances of mood with more and more subtlety. She finds metaphors using poetical associations and analogies. Thus, the series 'Seasons' came out as a continuation of her work on illustrating the book of short stories by Ivan Bunin 'The Dark Lanes'.

A window is a leitmotif of many Olga Okuneva’s works. Windows open into a garden, windows with bars, windows tightly closed ('A portrait in the autumn') bring an additional tune into her works. In the series of etchings 'A view from the window' (1992) we see fragments of houses and streets, trees, ladders and a repeated lonely female profile in the window. The artist is industriously building a house of her own, 'a house for the soul', constructing it with separate small houses which resemble post-covers, with broken chains of ladders, bars flying in the air like the autumn leaves. The feeling of loneliness and unsettled life is expressively conveyed in this graphical monologue pouring out of the author’s soul.

In 1993 Okuneva got an offer to illustrate Indian national epic poem “Mahabharata”. She plunged into studies of Indian sculpture, artistic canon, temple architecture and sculpture. In 1994 she created a set of colored etchings devoted to 'Mahabharata'. These lists demonstrated a new artistic quality. They were loaded with many fragments, minutely worked out details, but did not loose clarity of expression, playful easiness and action. The touch has also changed, it became more intricate and rounded.

It is hard to believe that the 'Mahabharata' was done before Olga came to India. Her first personal exhibition in India was accepted rapturously by local audience and critics. It took place in 1996 in Bhopal by the invitation of the Museum of Modern Art.

The next ten years were divided between Europe and India. India conquered Olga’s heart for ever and the love was mutual. Olga was so infatuated with new exhibitions, meetings, friends, with exotic beauty of Indian nature that she could not limit herself only by art. She began to write. Her articles and essays were published in newspapers and magazines. She illustrated them making drawings with color pencils. These drawings are not just cursory notes, they represent home-like, heart-felt corners of India. She is like saying: “I was here sitting on the steps of the old temple, this palm-garden caressed me with its coolness, this old dry tree caught my eye…”.

A tree was the hero of many Olga’s works from the very beginning. The hero indeed, not just a background or a detail. Olga as if by the intuition grasped the sacred meaning of a Tree and later, when reading old Indian and Greek pieces of literature she found a confirmation to her feeling. On coming to India where the tradition of veneration of sacred trees is still preserved and active, she got the inspiration for creating two big cycles of paintings – “The sacred grove” and “The closed garden”. Here is the eternal and inexhaustible theme: The Tree of life, The Tree of knowledge, The Arbor mundi as a symbol of the cosmos and the harmony of man and the world.

Olga Okuneva’s paintings are as poetic and associative as her etchings. She fills the space of her pictures with symbolic figures of animals and birds, she transfers the scene of the Nativity to Russia covered with snow, places it under the traditional New year fur-tree, she draws the Tree of life in white and creates the image of a dream-town reflected in waters of a lake, as a decoration from an Indian cloth…

The feel of a delicate beauty emanates from every enigmatic metaphor, refined texture, semitransparent glaze. And they are combined with the energy of rich-paste strokes and a solid structural organization.

Now Olga lives in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam. The art project which combines the paintings of the cycles "The Sacred Grove" and "The Walled Garden" just mentioned and etchings in different techniques was successfully displayed in the art-galleries of Amsterdam and the Hague.

Olga Okuneva has spent twenty five years in the field of art. Look again at her works, and you won’t find a single one made for the sake of a sheer originality or a beautifully laid stroke, for only admiring a texture. Her every creation is filled with her thought, her soul, her moods. They attract us, do not let us stay indifferent and linger in our memory for long.

Swetlana Rudstein, art critic

Translation by Alexander Dubianski