BETWEEN DREAM AND NIGHTMARE
“Real and surreal merge here: opposites unite, vibrant and sparkling flows into dark and misty, sexual and sinister twists with spiritual and loving.” This is how Russian artist Tanya Shatseva describes her paintings. A look at her website or Instagram page shows what a perfect description this is of her art. The women in Shateva’s paintings look like characters in a fairytale gone wrong. They are seen covered in rats, naked and alone in a forest, and about to be engulfed by a giant wave.
The women in Shateva’s paintings are always beautiful, and they rarely look scared. The often dark imagery of her work is juxtaposed against a vibrant color palette of acrylics, the perfect optical realism of her drawings abstracted by the bright pinks, blues, and yellows of her paint. Each of her paintings tell an entire story, and captures the moment when everything starts to go wrong.
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