Anna Tunikova, Sur la table – Paintings

Anna Tunikova, Sur la table – Paintings

From 8 April 2022,we will be presenting paintings by the artist Anna Tunikova, who was born in Saint Petersburg in 1994 and lives in Berlin. Under the title SUR LA TABLE, the painter is showing works that find their starting point in archaic forms.

Anna Tunikova’s large-format paintings take up tools and other utilitarian objects in archetypal patterns. Tables, chairs, a fireplace, simple crockery and cutlery form a backdrop on monochrome earth-coloured the subjects of the painted surfaces on monochrome earth-coloured backgrounds. A table, which rather introduces the abstract concept of “table”, is not exuberantly set, but only a stand for a single cup (“Sur la table”). This or a single chair (“Chair”) or stool (“Midnight”) appear stony and massive despite their simplicity. At the same time, the paintings’ light brushwork and simple strokes seem to be a product design of stone-age tools, reflecting the artist’s roots in graphic design.

How do you find focus in a diffuse world, how do you find calm in times of unrest? For the confrontation with an accelerated present, in which consumerism and information overload reign, the artist draws on an originally imagined and mythical past. She creates worlds of colour from ochre to umber and celebrates forms and patterns in her oil paintings that are reminiscent of rock drawings, abstract signs and lines in cave painting. The cave art to which the artist refers in her form of expression is the earliest art of Homo sapiens and the oldest evidence of human use of pigments and binders. Anna Tunikova knows how to put the viewer in a meditative state with a reduced range of forms and natural colour tones. In this field of tension between the times, what the audience is looking for opens up to them: calm and focus.