Natalya Igorevna Nesterova is a traditional artist. Like many masters of the 1970’s generation, she turned in her creative work not just to primitivism but also directly to the primitive, with its characteristic artistic tools – local colour, graphics and a simplified composition. Her favourite subjects are festive and leisurely walks, everlasting holidays by the coast, pointless rambling around the town, many hours spent sitting in a café. The people on her canvases often look like masks, figures frozen in the artistic poses of mannequins, objects in awkward positions.The hands in Nesterova’s works often say more than the faces. Cards are one of the most important symbols present in the works of Natalya Nesterova.As a theme, they have many meanings and the meaning of the pack varies as a system of values with a mystical meaning and magical properties. The characters are not playing cards and do not tell fortunes from them, rather they are themselves being played and fortunes told from them. Sometimes the cards themselves are characters, pictures in the form of ‘Fishes’, ‘Birds’, ‘Dogs’ etc. The compositions of Nesterova’s pictures are different, for this reason they can easily be divided into diptychs and triptychs.
THE TSUKANOV ART COLLECTION
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Nesterova Natalia | ‘Maybe at some moment I will like what I do, that it will seem that I have achieved something, then, I think, my work will be finished. But for the meantime, I am either running, lingering or tearing along in the wake of my thoughts, trying to express or externalise them on the canvas. Whether I succeed in this is for you to judge’. |
Born in 1944 | ||
‘Nesterova’s works are universal. The person in the landscape is not a Russian or an American, it is a person as a phenomenon of nature, as a part of its design. This is what typifies the paintings of Nesterova in the 1980’s and those which were painted at the start of the 21st century – ‘Breathing of the sea’, ‘Bicycle’ and ‘Autumnal Park’. Although art historians can find traces of surrealism and expressionism in her creativity, her paintings on biblical subjects show a natural-naturalistic beginning, the name Nesterova evokes the definition ‘academic artist’. Aleksandre Gertsman, President of ‘IntArt’
The artist's work can be found in the following museums and collections:
| Mask. Soul Kolodzei Art Foundation | Reflection Contemporary Art Museum |
