Alice Nikitinová

If the latest paintings of Alice Nikitinová (1979) were presented with the accompaniment of Coldcut’s music, those anonymous guys clad in brightly colored overalls might gradually start to move. Nikitinová’s previous works have included thematic traffic signs, surface improvements and colored areas projected into the view of people living in a city. By reproducing surfaces while disregarding facial features the artist arrives at the substance of visual information in an urban environment, the characteristics of which are the semiotic nature and anonymity. Although the artist is fascinated by bright colors, she focuses on the ground while generously endowing a monumentality to common objects and workers. Her dialogue with the history of art (Socialist Realism, Malevitch, Picasso, Dada) reflects her Czech-Ukrainian roots and education in the arts in Kiev. From there she also has a subtly ironic sense of humor, through which she has managed to incorporate into her geometrical abstraction with colored horizontal stripes a single one hairy stripe. Paintings based on the works of Sasha Kirpichnikov have historical connotations. These children’s drawings titled by their creator The Conquest of Cosmos obviously come from the sixties when people believed that in 2006 we’d be spending our vacations wandering around on Mars. Nevertheless, Alice had to notice them as they were lying on the ground next to a garbage can in Kiev before she could use them as the basis for her cycle of paintings that bear the same name. In an environment where not many contemporary paintings take on color as a substantial principle, Alice Nikitinová can be labeled a colorist. However, she continues to focus also on objects or environments, working with conceptual techniques. This distinguishes her from other graduates of the school of painting of the colorist Jiří Sopko at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU) as well as from most other representatives of contemporary Czech painting. Her cycle of pictures presenting shoes painted in various ways originated from a project of Avdey Ter-Oganian to open six identical exhibitions simultaneously in six galleries in Berlin that has yet to be implemented. Alice conceived her six canvases with identical rows of shoes as an enumeration of potential ways to depict objects in color. Objects have their expression as well – and as you can find out by comparing these six examples of similar still-lifes, the shoes of Alice Nikitinová pretend nothing.

01.01.2007