“The main topic of my research in art is the psychology of sexuality, personal drama, raised in cult.”
Nina Murashkina makes sensual and metaphorical art which is built on her own sexuality and empirical knowledge of herself.
The artist crystallizes her own intimate experiences and reproduces her own vision of a woman through the vivid feminine images. The women with ambiguous and discredited positioning today are the Goddess: strong and weak at the same time with their snakelike plasticity and delicate sense, rational aspiration and irrational doubt that is able to capture but is more often to be captured.
She lives with an infinite thirst for the harmony of all her entities. Murashkina and her female characters are integral to each other, her stories are the ones of her own experiences and metaphorical self-portraits.
From a young age she subtly compiled her female image. The elegance of the 19th century was borrowed from Victorian literature and boldly combined with the ghostly memories of the gloomy, late-Soviet life of Donetsk – the smell of nylon stockings and worn out mother’s pearls.
The realities of the environment where the artist formed are deliberately adorned by the aesthetics of the sentimental era. The fairy fabulousness of Nina’s world scares and the imaginary intimate images of her diaries arise their erotic tone. The artist openly and ironically speaks of one-time love, self-sacrificing trust and the naive play of a young woman towards maturity. With acquiring experience a young woman ascends the peak, where she could for the first time entirely embrace herself in artistic practice and peer into new perspectives.
Murashkina blatantly juggles with a variety of symbols in her works and among the accumulated cultural codes of the epoches the perceiver will meet the attending symbols which will lead them through the tunnels of the artist’s world.
For example, the eyes on the nipples are a long-standing image of hypersensitivity, the ability to rely on deep irrational inner instruments of cognition of the world.
¨Bless me, Darling…¨
сeramic vase, underglaze drawing, third fire.
42 × 22.5 × 22.5 cm, 2022
In this work, the image of Jesus is a nice guy in the style of “hippie”.
The women ask Jesus, “Bless me, darling…”
Flirting with a man, attracting attention to themself, by all means, is a bright specific feature of many real women. Even flirting where it would seem that flirting is inappropriate – in the religious sphere.
The melancholy purple background only emphasizes the humor of what is happening, a little unreal, but such a familiar feeling of blessing from a man, from the Jesus dear to the heart.
“Like a fish out of water”
ceramic vase, underglaze drawing, gold, a third fire
15 × 9 1/10 × 9 1/10 in | 38 × 23 × 23 cm, 2022
Like a fish out of water’ depicts the experience of Ukrainian women who found themselves in a foreign place. They are shown as mermaids, beached on land but still maintaining their beauty. Murashkina illustrates how these women still want to look and feel beautiful, despite their situation. The men are being seduced by these women, with one depicted as an Egyptian god riding on two large cats – a symbol of the night. The eyes on the women’s breast are a recurring symbol in Murashkina’s pieces. It is a reference to the goddess Baubo from Greek mythology, who has her face on her torso and is a depiction of sexual liberation and feminine instinct. Murashkina creates a playful scene showing how, despite everything, the beauty and confidence of these women remains.