Natalia
Igorevna Nesterova

Born in 1944 in Moscow. She graduated from Moscow Art School and the Moscow Art Institute. Surikova

Since 1969 - Member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. Since 1992 - Professor of Painting at the Department of Scenography of the Russian Academy of Theater Arts. Honored Artist of Russia, laureate of prizes for the best work of the year in 1982, 1986, 1989, laureate of the State Prize in the field of literature and art for 1998 (for the series of paintings "On the Seaside", "Gospel stories", "Paintings from cards ";" Feast "(Pirs). Since 1998 - corresponding member of the Academy of Arts of Russia.

Nesterova’s works are kept in the State Tretyakov Gallery, the State Russian Museum, the Museum of Oriental Art, the Cosmonautics Museum, the Pleiades Museum, in the collection of Art Modern galleries, the Moscow Palette, MARS (Moscow), in 39 museums of the CIS countries, as well as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Art Museum (Warsaw), collection of Peter Ludwig (Cologne, Aachen), Art Museum (Seoul), Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, Art Museum (Poznan), Oklahoma Museum, Hal Brom Gallery, Art Museum (Tallinn ), Maya Paul Gallery Lsky (Chicago), private collections in the USA, Europe, America, Asia, Estonia.

Born in Moscow in 1944 in a family of architects. In 1962-1968, she studied at the Moscow State Art Institute named after V.I. Surikov with the famous painter, professor Dmitry Zhilinsky. In 1969, Nesterova was admitted to the Union of Artists. The artist has many and often exhibited at official exhibitions. It never belonged to non-conformists, in its creative orientation it can most likely be attributed to the so-called “left MOSH”. It was popular among the Russian intelligentsia during the period of stagnation.

Natalia Nesterova remained one of the most recognized seventies masters. The Fatherland did not deprive her of her awards and titles: State Prize, Triumph Prize, the title of Honored Artist of the Russian Federation, the title of academician and the Honorary Gold Medal of the Academy of Arts. Since 1991 she is a professor of painting at the Russian Academy of Arts.

Since 1988, the artist has mostly lived in the United States. She has participated in over sixty individual and group exhibitions at home and abroad. Her paintings are stored in major domestic collections: in the State Russian Museum, the State Tretyakov Gallery, as well as in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, in the museums of Montreal, Beijing and others.

Like many masters of the generation of the 1970s, Nesterova turned in her work to the primitive with its characteristic artistic means - local color, graphic art, simplified composition. At the same time, the artist creates a complex colorful surface, where textured, as if fashioned by color, areas are adjacent to smooth strokes. In this expressive pictorial language, she tells simple at first glance stories.

Her paintings can be described as genre, filled with satirical pathos. Favorite subjects - festive and idle celebrations, pesky rest on the seashore, aimless walks around the city, endless playing cards, many hours of sitting in a cafe. The faces on her canvases often look like masks, the figures froze in artificial mannequin poses, and things in ridiculous positions. Recognizable and topographically authentic city landscapes turn into a fake space, where mise-en-scenes from the theater of the absurdity are played out with false ambiguity.

The anti-heroes of Nesterov’s canvases languish with boredom, loneliness and the meaninglessness of their existence, they are empty and hectic. These are the inhabitants of the last Soviet period.

(Pelevin Yu.A.)