Tatyana Badanina. Your White House

AZ ART space is opening the exhibition “Your White House”, presenting the artworks by Tatiana Badanina.

Starting from the 1990-s, Tatiana has been participating in numerous contemporary art exhibitions, in both solo and group projects in Russia and abroad. Today her painting and graphic works, art objects and installations are displayed in the most important museums in Russia. The exhibition in AZ ART features graphics from the series “Projects” 2007, “Winged Objects” 2019, “Constellations” 2020, “White Cloths. Dedication” (since 2006) and video-installation “The Sky” 2023.

“I paint the sky, i paint heaven,” — writes Tatiana Badanina about her artistic searches, focused on metaphysics of the white color. The artist also tells about the exhibit: “The main idea of the project is the Light, being metaphoric for the internal enlightenment, spiritual victory of life over death. The white incites all the colors in the spectrum. By dipping everything in its beams, it becomes the basis of the physical life and has divine nature. The Light is the origin of all that exists. The Light is life. I perceive the process of creating art as sacred action, and that defines my works as metaphysical. Art-making is a prayer for me, and meticulous handiwork stands for a meditation act.”

The exhibition is titled by the first lines of the poem by Anna Akhmatova (“Your White House…”). Written in 1913, it is the poetic memory of something that is already gone. Art historian Vitaliy Patsyukov writes about the symbolism of white: “In her “white” compositions Tatiana Badanina delves into her childhood, its cosmic abyss and the feel of the first contact with life, conveyed from the muteness to the plastique language. They store all the codes of the art about herself, about losses and pains, her body substance, isomorphic spirit structures, about what is “out there.”

I’ll leave your white house and your quiet garden.
May life become all bare and filled with light.
I’ll glorify you with a verse so ardent
More than a woman could’ve glorified.
As you recall your dear beloved’s eyes
In heaven you yourself have fashioned,
I’m trading with the rarest merchandise —
I’m selling off your tenderness and passion.*

Anna Akhmatova

Artworks by Tatiana Badanina bring the viewer back to the searches and discoveries of the first Russian avant-guard, reminding transparent voluminous constructions by Vladimir Tatlin or brutal architectonic objects by Kasimir Malevich. Today Tatiana leaves usual frames of time and space, breathing eternity in each of her works.

*poem translated by Andrey Kneller