Curvaceous Drama: Ella Kruglyanskaya

Latvian painter Ella Kruglyanskaya presents her second solo show in Glasgow, and brings together paintings from across her career. Visually punchy and dramatic, she paints mainly curvy woman often on or surrounded by rich fabric

Feature by Holly Gavin | 04 Nov 2016

Ella Kruglyanskaya’s opening at Tramway in October was a highly anticipated event. It marked the Latvian-born, New York-based painter's second solo show in Glasgow, the first having taken place at Koppe Astner in 2014. This one has travelled north from Tate Liverpool where the show was held over the summer months, and is a curatorial collaboration between Tramway’s Claire Jackson and Tate Liverpool’s Stephanie Straine. 

The exhibition presents a total of 17 paintings from the last ten years of Kruglyanskaya’s career – among which lie examples that the artist considers breakthroughs or catalysts for work that follows – and four paintings of Bauhaus vessels from her newest body of work. The juxtaposition of busty, (sometimes) larger-than-life women and bulbous pots can imply a parallel between female bodies and objects as subjects of interest for painting and therefore to look at; but it is the male gaze, if anything, that Kruglyanskaya objectifies in the form of garments sometimes worn by her figures.

"There is no other subtext"

The pairing of two very different bodies of work seduces viewers to attain overarching motives, but Kruglyanskaya says that her paintings of vessels are an attempt to bridge personal interests and her painting practice. They are paintings of closely cropped sections from a book of Bauhaus objects she has always loved. As she explained in a talk in the space on 12 October, "There’s this very funny notion when people think that the artist, especially with painting, holds some kind of secret knowledge, that they can tell you what’s really going on, [but] I don’t believe that." 

Pointing to her painting Bathers (2006), where the swimsuit-clad subject fixes a stare over her shoulder, Kruglyanskaya says, "I don’t know what she’s looking at." Equally, with regards to the secret shared by the two figures in Gossip Girls (2010), she explains, "There is no other subtext."

This highlights the danger, or rather the unnecessary preoccupation with reading too much into works of art. Kruglyanskaya is interested in making paintings, which come from her personal realisations that a certain drawing (her uncensored mode of visual transcription concretising imagined scenes) or page (as with the Bauhaus book), may become an interesting painting.  Projection happens on the viewer’s part; we are left to our own devices, to identify characters and decode narratives, significances, and relations.

Although Kruglyanskaya gives enough visual information to construct the entire beach scene witnessed by the figure in Girl with Sunglasses (2008), there is already plenty of intrigue in the characters’ garb, body language and facture. Perhaps, due to a lack of known reference points outside the paintings themselves, it becomes tempting to cast individual ideas and desires onto them; but the painting is only what it holds on its surface.


Bathers, Ella Kruglyanskaya

There is an inherent intensity in Kruglyanskaya’s paintings that is satisfying, to say the least. She speaks about practising an economy of means, while professing her own laziness ("I’m going to go for the maximum impact within my limited capacity"). However, there is both just enough and a lot to go by in her paintings, a sense of saturation stemming from a certain maturity in her decision-making – what is included is there with a particular purpose.

Kruglyanskaya is aware of her limitations as a painter and the limitations of her medium, so she works in "a method of elimination," asking, "what can work in a painting? What can be painted?" She is not content with "painting whatever" and expecting the best, but works towards a subject, by asking questions like "Can you make a painting exude some kind of emotional charge? Can you make a painting that’s dramatic? Can you have suspense in a painting?" The answer is most definitely yes. 

This efficacy is captured brilliantly in Primary Colors I and II (2006). The egg-tempera panels showcase two female figures in the moments just before and after one shoots the other. Although egg-tempera is a slow and tedious painting technique, (which Kruglyanskaya first began using during her studies to disrupt painting habits she had acquired from traditional fine art training with oil paints), the resulting images capturing a violent assault look speedily painted, perhaps to exaggerate this pinnacle moment of (cinematic) drama. The rough brushstrokes and truncated narrative recall storyboards from behind-the-scenes footage from animated film studios.  

Visual tricks and dramatic secrets

Clever, calculated decisions and visual trickery are very much a part of Kruglyanskaya’s practice. She aims to alter the representation of women in visual culture by presenting women as active protagonists, but they are large and busty characters; the exaggeration of sensuous female curves is a key element in her humourous approach, but prerhaps their cartoonish nature makes them more approachable – like universal characters we can all remember reading about growing up. There are dramatic secrets and sights in this imaginary world, but all we know as viewers is that it is their dramatic secret.

Visual trickery also appears as formal elements of composition and the employment of trompe l’oeil, a technique usually associated with decorative painting. Girls with Drinks with Paper Cutouts and Large Bather with Paper Cutouts (both 2016) are large paintings of Kruglyanskaya’s collages: outline drawings of women with pieces of coloured paper previously made for a magazine feature. There are shadows bordering her collages lying or hung on a backdrop, certainly a flat surface: a table in her studio, perhaps, or a wall? A large white rectangle, the piece of paper, is painted ‘paper white’. Her figures are drawn atop in oil bar; the whole ensemble looks like a large drawing, but it is more considered; there is a fine pencil line below her oil bar outline.

Kruglyanskaya paints pieces of paper and pages; she creates still-lifes from images not only assembled, but also made by the artist herself. She considers a two-dimensional plane, (drawing, collage or page), treats it as a three-dimensional set-up, (still-life), and paints a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional surface (trompe l’oeil painting). She shares a pearl of wisdom: "You make a work and then it takes this place where it’s not part of you – it’s like it's a separate thing in the world and it’s as if it already existed, and that’s a very kind of exciting feeling." To a certain degree, her new works embody this statement. The Bauhaus vessels are not hers, but they also have their own existence as objects captured in photographs in a book from the painter’s personal library, and now the subjects of her paintings.

 Kruglyanskaya’s paintings are not radical in subject, technique, or scale, and although they may somehow seem slightly dated, they are exciting as hell. There are hints of Picasso and Matisse in the Paper Cutouts, and Botero and Guston in her obsession with these large figures, but her paintings are nevertheless stimulatingly surprising. She expresses that painting has automatically succumbed to its history even if it is personally ignored, but as she adds, painting is certainly not dead. Kruglyanskaya still manages to make brilliant paintings with the appeal of novelty and they certainly pack a punch.

Ella Kruglyanskaya, Tramway, until 11 Dec