523 East 12th Street NYC

NIKOLINA KOVALENKO- Artist BIO

Nikolina Kovalenko received her MFA from Moscow Surikov Art Institute and studied in Berlin at UDK. She holds a Gold Medal from the Russian Art Academy. Nikolina currently lives and works in New York.

Kovalenko states, “My work captures the confrontation between realism and idealism making the modern consumer choke on their choices. Let others deal with your internal chaos. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone."

Recent reviews:

"Presented as actors in a drama with cosmic significance, the figures that people Kovalenko's paintings engage in various kinds of display, presenting a calculated face to the world around them. By their makeup, dress, and roles, the masqueraders create a persona that is echoed by the world around them. Kovalenko's "Masquerade" encourages viewers to consider how much of their own identity is performed, and whether the face we present to the world is what we would really want to show."

Fine Art Connoisseur

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Artist Statement

"I'm interested in people - their habits, dreams, delusions, and drawbacks. My work explores how we find ways to emerge victorious from complicated, weird, challenging, dangerous, absurd situations or how we manage to completely ignore the obvious.

I love to observe, to notice the hidden meanings and humor in everyday life, to create my own connections between contrasts. I always carry a sketchbook to capture these unusual moments. Sometimes my pencil finds the secret messages during the process of drawing lines, silhouettes and facial expressions.

I create a series of canvases picturing people interacting with their own masks. In this world of masquerade we wear masks in different moments and circumstances, forming a seemingly infinite pocket catalog of perfectly fitting masks for every life situation that doesn’t leave us indifferent. Being aware of it or not, we create this circus of emotions that provides us a comfort zone in a daily whirlwind of change. I want to explore, dissect, undress, understand and convey these complex moments in my oil paintings, executed very realistically, following our everyday life routine but with this otherwise invisible mask on. Suddenly the totally normal picture creates dissonance between the reality we are used to seeing and this superimposed mask.

I want to increase people’s awareness of their actions by showing them the twisted reality we live in from a different angle. "