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Tatyana
Grigorievna Nazarenko

Russia • born in 1944

Born in Moscow in the family of a regular soldier. Graduated from the Moscow State Art Institute named after V.I.Surikova (1968), where she studied, in particular, with Dmitry Zhilinsky. She also studied at the creative workshops of the USSR Academy of Arts (1969–1972), where her mentor was Helium Korzhev. It won official recognition with works as if it were in full conformity with traditional ideas about an ideologically sustained “thematic picture” (“Execution of Narodnaya Voltsev”, 1969–1972, State Tretyakov Gallery; “Partisans Came”, 1975, MK of the Russian Federation), however, it was already characteristic of her art theatricalization and semantic layering of images. In lyrical works, her painting is already frankly "de-ideologized." The motives of the festivities (“Seeing the Winter”, 1973) and “gatherings in the workshop” (“Moscow Evening”, 1978) are crafty-ironic or poetically contemplative. These are signs of “carnivalism” (the term of A. I. Morozov), a stylistic tendency of the 1970-1980s, which expressed the process of erosion and, ultimately, the disappearance of the boundaries between “official” and “unofficial” creativity. "Self-portrait" (1984–1986), where Nazarenko, in the form of a circus dancer, passes over the heads of the functionary cultures of the time, has become, in this sense, an epoch-making way in its own way. Over time, her picturesque "theaters" become more grotesque, including elements of a surreal "black humor" (through characters of masks, puppet theater, cannibalism).

Since 1996, she often gives her images three-dimensionality, supplementing or replacing her canvases with combinations of silhouette figures of a natural size that seem to emerge from the picture in the real world (installations: Transition, 1996; My Paris, 1997).

Laureate of the State Prize of the Russian Federation (1994). Lives in Moscow.

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