About Svetlana – Svetlana Tartakovska

Svetlana Tartakovska was born in 1979 in Berditchev near Kiev. She lives and works in The Netherlands for 13 years and she graduated at the Klassieke Academie voor Beeldende Kunst (Classical Academy for Visual Arts) in Groningen. She also studied at The Art Academy in Florence and attented workshops at Sam Drukker. She is a young woman with a rich inheritance from an old culture: a treasury of world-famous authors including Dostojewsky and Lermontov and great painters like Repin. The traces of the Russian art history are present in all her classical and theatrical appearances. It can also be seen in her palette, in the sometimes darker use of colours, using black as the means of expression and here and there paint drips as blood, sweat and tears that are part of emotional of melancholic depictions. But also with white she is capable to suggest strong shapes by painting white in white from which figures appear. Therefore we can, for now, divide her work into white and black series with each their own charisma and theme.

Svetlana is a painter of people ‘pur sang’ with a psychological depth. Some paintings are society-inspired and are about the fragileness of the human being. Those paintings show her strive to make deep emotions convincing at the highest possible technical level and with which she wants to make the observer dwell on the work for a short time. They also depict events or meetings with people from her daily life. Those people she makes into her model and transforms them as it were to the image she saw for herself and wanted to depict. Because the paintings tell stories that are lade with symbolism and memories, they can be filed under the conceptual contemporary realism. With this and her ode to Naturalism she gives new impulses to the versatile Realism of this time.

Greet Hamming, art historian

Download (Dutch):
Svetlana Tartakovska Brochure – Bevrorem Momenten
Svetlana Tartakovska Brochure – Bevrorem Emoties