The Next Generation: Alyona Grishko

On the Verge

While walking an invisible line between reality and the emotional, spiritual, and mystical, Moscow, Russia-based artist Alyona Grishko captures the intensely delicate sensation of standing right on the edge. The artist is focused on capturing mystical elements and exploring the worlds of dreams and memories. It is easy to understand how that mysticism is portrayed in the way that every painted figure always seems to be right on the verge of being overtaken by something powerful and surreal. It seems that each body is capable of suddenly dissolving into the heavy shadows of Grishko’s canvases or that in the blink of an eye, the world might go blank and disappear into total lightness. In these elaborate and elegant displays of otherworldly tension, Alyona Grishko treads a fine and precarious path sure to expose and reveal things as raw and unexpected as they can possibly be.

Part One: Who is Alyona Grishko?

Question #1: Who are you?

I am a prism that lets the outside world pass through

Question #2: Who are you as an artist?

I am an adherent of romanticism, in the sense of feeling life and nature as passion, and intuition and insight as the main way of knowing and creating.

Question #3: What do you think about while creating?

I think about the dimension where projections of our dreams and memories exist and how they affect our daily and social life.

Question #4: What is something you wish someone had told you at some point in your life?

That I’m an artist who shows the world which we always felt but never have seen

Question #5: Why do you need art your life?

I always knew that I was born for saying something, I have been a thoughtful child since childhood like little wise Pei Mei (“Kill Bill”) 😀
And after three days coma I started my artist way

Question #6: Is your artwork for yourself or for others?

My artwork are for me only while I draw it. The characters of my them become a screen onto which the viewer is free to project their feelings.

Question #7: What is your escape?

My escape is death, not physical one, but a social absence in the context of detachment, immersion in oneself and falling out of casual life.

Part Two: Dreams and Memories

How do you describe your work and practice?

Central to the my work are themes of remembrance and oblivion, traces of the past and addressing anxiety. I explore the relationship between waking life and memories, mysticism of dreams and self-discovery among this. Intentional incompleteness and surrealistic details give the mixed feeling of longing and loneliness, showing the advantage of the emotional component over the narrative.

Each one is nude in Holy’s front.
Pitiful, nude and poor a lot.
Each melody brings Bakh, or Brandt.
Each body keeps the Lord.

I am attracted by borderline phenomena that hide in the folds of reality, not quite distinguishable, but real. Like mirages, dreams, memories.
When you close your eyes
trying to remember some image. And it is blurry, covered with drips of time, barely emerges from the fog of memory. Slips away again.
In a second, the face will turn and I recognize it, but the flashes of the present cover the mouth of the past.

I think that all our memories live in some other dimension in which we sometimes find ourselves. Because when we immerse ourselves in memories we definitely fall out of reality, we die here and come to life there. The images of that dimension are indistinct, grainy and vibrating

As for me, painting just can’t be light.
It’s always about mysteriousness, about some understatement, mysticism, the hidden power of art, which can’t be and shouldn’t be declassified.

Where/ How can Vacant Museum viewers see more of your work and where can they purchase it?

alenagrishko.com
@grishkoart