Alyona Kirtsova is an artist and poet, born in 1954 in Barentsburg on the island of Svalbard. Now he lives and works in Moscow. From 1973 to 1975 she studied with the painter and graphic artist Vasily Sitnikov.

In the early 1980s, Kirtsova moved away from figurative painting and began searching for new means of expression, focusing on the transfer of real visual images through color planes and reducing the shapes of objects found in everyday life. Offering her own version of geometric abstraction, the artist, using the organic use of color as the main driving force of the image, shows the reality around her through the interaction of coloristic contrasts in space.

In the early 1990s, Kirtsova developed her own artistic method – in her works, form and materials are constantly changing, and conceptually art is built around the theme of sensual experiences of the moment. Rigid geometry is replaced by a focus on the transmission of sensations and memories, as well as a desire to reflect being in all its versatility. Bright, contrasting geometric structures are replaced by more restrained compositions subordinated to the free expression of the color mass. Turning to natural phenomena and forms, or observing the metamorphoses of a man-made surface, the artist invariably achieves the materialization of color, which is the essence of each image she sees, whether it is a fragment of a plastered wall or a coastal landscape.

The artist’s series “Pigment. Paint. Colour” represents “portraits” of famous paints with vivid individual expressiveness, which acquire their charismatic visual image on Kirtsova’s canvases.   

“In canvas, I value its plasticity and springiness — the way it gives in and breathes depending on the pressure on it with a brush or palette knife. I love oil for its incredible plasticity, for its density, for its fluidity and transparency, when necessary. For the fact that you can put it in many layers — thick and thin; for the fact that it dries slowly; for the fact that you can rewrite almost indefinitely. For the smell. For unpredictability: drying up and drying out, it continues to live its life, changing, until it dies,” admits Alyona Kirtsova.

The exhibition at SISTEMA GALLERY will feature the series “Severnoye Chertanovo”, “Kazachiy Lane”, “Sudak”, “Landscape”, “Travels”, “North”, “Handbook of Color”, “Gray Scale”, as well as individual works of the 1980s-2020s.

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