Shtager&Shch is pleased to present a new body of work by Katya Granova who moved from St Petersburg to London in 2017.
Granova's practice explores the fallibility of personal memory and collective history and the intersection at which both meet. Initially turning to family albums in search for cultural belonging as a recent immigrant, she has more recently expanded her subjects to anonymous vintage photographs.
Katya Granova describes her life-size paintings as portals to the past. Working from black and white photographs, she inserts herself through the use of colour and propels historical scenes into the present. By selecting ubiquitous settings of bathers or celebrations, her subjects are at once individual and universal.
Soldiers are another recurring subject in Granova's work, who was born in the Soviet Union shortly before its transition to capitalist Russia. Found in photo albums of many families on either side of any conflict, the military references highlight the inseparability of the personal and the political. As an artist of both dual Russian and Ukrainian heritage the dilemma of national identity has become inescapable for Katya Granova. She has volunteered extensively to support Ukrainian refugees before launching her own initiative set up specifically to support other artists to apply for a talent visa that allows them to pursue their practice in the UK.
Katya Granova (b.1988) is an artist and curator from St Petersburg, Russia, who currently lives in London. She received a degree in Social Psychology at St Petersburg State University before continuing her education at the Paris College of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Moscow. She holds and MA Art & Space from Kingston University and an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London. Her work has been widely exhibited and is held in private collections in the UK, France and Russia.
Text: Meike Burnkhorst
Exhibition essay: Kate Reeve-Edwards
Voices From A Suitcase
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