Divine Observation

Inga Khurieva: Divine Observation presents a stunning contemporary tableau featuring pop culture, religious and historic imagery presented in Neo-Surrealist dreamscapes. Born in a small village in Russia, and based in the United States since 2013, Khurieva’s dreamscapes offer intimate perspectives on themes such as beauty, motherhood, and relationships. Figures are often highly detailed and imbued with emotion, with some fading into the background. This casts an unsettled feeling of inhabiting two realities, or two realms. Inga notes that the overlap of spiritual and physical realms manifests in her compositions, reflecting that the “...aim [is] to evoke a sense of disorientation, fragmented reality, the state in between worlds.” Works such as Apparition, which offers a Chagall-esque take on a religious awakening equally influenced by Surrealist approaches to painting. A partially nude figure stands at the end of a table, where dishes encircle the table, suspended in a seaside scene where the viewer is directed to the Madonna and Child appearing, riding a white horse and flanked by fruits. A fever pitch of flora and fauna arise from the picture plane, with a lack of depth in the figures hinting at pastiched imagery of a dreamlike state forming the dissolution of logic.

Khurieva’s imagery finds its zenith in the balance between individual elements in these paintings and these works’ overall compositions. Where curvilinear, voluminous figures hold space in the centers of these artworks, the expressions of these figures and their appearances vary significantly. Beauty and truth can be found in the fragmented forms that Khurieva presents, offering a reality more aligned with our perception of the world around us than the world as it is. On view through November 30th, Inga Khurieva: Divine Observation brings a sense of mystery and desire to contemporary art, culminating in an elegiac homage to the world we inhabit as our secret selves.