Vienna like Saint Petersburg is a city that is steeped in history and thinks back to the past. It’s a city whose lives and identities run in parallel overlapping each other, against which the present seems rather insignificant. Birds and butterflies are liminal creatures that travel between worlds while plants grow through layers of time threading them on their stems. I paint from museum effigies, bringing them to life in my works, as well as their contemporaries, old views of cities. And nothing has disappeared.
Xenia Ostrovskaya
I wondered for a long time where the tiger came from in the street
Daniil Kharms
Xenia Ostrovskaya lives in Vienna and regularly draws animals in the Museum of Natural History. As is well-known, natural history and history of art have been interrelated in this city for more than 100 years. Similarly, Ostrovskaya’s series of drawings combines nature that has become culture with the culture that has been traditionally perceived as nature. In St. Petersburg, where the artist is from, this balance of forces is unchanging, yet fluid like it is in Vienna.
It is clear why there are buildings and city landscapes; if you live in a city long enough its cultural layer loosens up and gives the artist those sets of random and anonymous images that are suitable for creative dissection. But why are they paired with tropical butterflies and birds? Perhaps because exotic animals are always a fantasy: it is not accidentally that a zoo in the modern city remains a model of the Garden of Eden, just as any urban plan used to be a model of the Heavenly Jerusalem. When drawing animals, any artist is transported into the world of the imaginary primarily depicting imaginary creatures rather than the scenes and views observed.
One can consider The Birth of the Zoo as a reference to Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Prison. A menagerie, which emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century, is even more disciplinary due to the fact that the animals are voiceless. Twice as much they are in the showcases of zoological museums, one must add. In nature, an animal is a living organism and an integral whole, while in a museum it is always artificial and complex.
You can bring to life static architecture with a flap of a bird’s wing — a well-known technique favoured by all photographers. But what if the bird has long been frozen in a museum showcase? Whom and how does the artist drawing birds bring to life in this case? What is the reason behind juxtaposition and what is able to produce a spark? These questions can be easily answered by anyone who has seen a bird or at least a moth fly into their flat through the window.
Urban European architecture is as restrained as black and white graphics. Birds from exotic regions of our planet embody all the variety and exuberance of colour which painting is usually responsible for. Two different natures are framed in one work, with their juxtaposition and fusion evoking reflexes, with forms being intertwined and their outlines rhyming and flowing into each other. Animalistic drawing, which goes back to John Audubon and his “Birds of America”, has been fused with contemporary art. Contemporary art is increasingly going back to the time when the now popular concept of “optics” had a literal meaning — an attentive and curious gaze of an artist who was a researcher at the same time.
At first, for her work the artist picked up postcards with the photos of city landmarks at the flea market. Our ancestors having so many connections knew how to save money far better than we do. Small handwriting on the left side of the Carte Postale; phrases written in view of the inevitable postal anticipation; a mixture of German, Hungarian, French (and Russian, of course) — all this has become the hallmarks of the past. There wasn’t enough space for news, stories and wishes from relatives as always; the text overflowed and overlapped the picture that Ostrovskaya has been able to enhance with a pen and a brush more than one hundred years later. The transformation of a vintage photo is not so difficult these days — the discovery made for fun by Victorian gentlemen was elevated to the artistic method by the classical surrealists. One of the first (or at least the most famous in the history of art) examples of such a combination of completely different images is Salvador Dali, who combined a rhinoceros and The Lacemaker from the Louvre in one drawing.
Birds accompanied the inventor of the surrealist collage Max Ernst all his life as his totemic creatures. The collage principle responsible for the strangeness of the juxtapositions serves as a driving force in Ostrovskaya’s works as well. In her drawings, animals and buildings, one-day butterflies and century-old edifices — everything that is mobile and fundamental is linked together by a thin yet strong graphic thread: among grey city stones a bright bird pushes the limit beyond the edges of a leaf, and what is more, beyond the imaginary.
Pavel Gerasimenko, 2022
Translated by Aleksandra Gorelova
