Exhibition project by Natasha Shalina "Letters from childhood" Automatic translate

The exhibition project of Natasha Shalina “Letters from Childhood” will be held at the ARTSTORY Gallery from April 21 to June 19, 2022. The exhibition will feature paintings, as well as objects, painting on fabric, works using fragments of old furniture, and installation. All works are united by reflections-memories of childhood. Bright time, full of joy and games, and sometimes fears and experiences - a separate mystical world of a bygone time.

Natasha Shalina was born in Krasnoyarsk, but has been living in St. Petersburg for a long time. This is her first personal project in Moscow.

The exhibition of Natasha Shalina is the result of the author’s personal "excavations", when the artist shows the viewer the treasures that were stored in the bowels of her memory. She finds precise art forms to express her childhood experiences; tells amazing stories in his own recognizable language. He carefully puts his childhood experiences into boxes, creating “secrets” from them - this term is familiar to many who grew up in the 1970s and 80s - when children collected all kinds of trinkets and buried them, creating small treasures.

According to Shalina, the exhibition is “a reflection on childhood with its first discoveries, joy and love, fears and losses. Our memory stacks all the events of our life in layers, so deeply that we sometimes do not remember anything. How a long time ago a little girl made a “secret”… Growing up, losing loved ones, loved ones and dear people, we again begin to find our “secrets”, brushing off a large layer of earth from them, with bated breath we peer into our treasures that crumble to dust right before our eyes."

Shalina creates her own mysterious universe, inhabited by melancholy characters in beautiful old-fashioned dresses and their dolls, which seem to be miniature copies of The Girls themselves. And along with this, there is a place for mysterious creatures - perhaps these are the monsters that children are so afraid of. The artist turns to her own memory, reviving images from childhood. At the same time, the heroes of her works are recognizable and understandable to a wide audience, which ensures a more complete immersion of the viewer into the amazing and alluring world of Natasha Shalina.

Objects can be chests or simply flat plank surfaces with the obligatory old handle on top - they can be carried and, of course, opened. Inside you will find the same Girls, for example, at a round table with a kettle and a cat. And next - a girl on the edge of a shabby wooden chair.

Paintings and objects by Shalina are not devoid of conventionality: they do not assume either a portrait resemblance or an exact “fixation” of reality. All Girls, largely due to their static nature, are perceived simply as toys standing in the closet, waiting for “activation”. At the same time, the use of a naive art form enhances the emotional effect of Natasha’s work. They contain a lot of personal: experience, experiences, memories, so it is easy for the viewer to remember their own childhood stories. Favorite dolls, games they once played, old photographs of their grandparents, the sun in summer and felt boots in winter, the smell of an old wooden wardrobe… “I want to touch it with my hands, I want to take a deep breath and hug my childhood!” says Natasha Shalina.

The artist is not limited to the creation of paintings and objects, she subjugates the entire space of exhibition halls to her art, involving the viewer in a great journey, in a game with her own memory, offering to completely immerse herself in this universe, where there are neither rules nor a definite outcome.