Artist statement
Natalia Zourabova is a daily life visionary. Using a limited visual vocabulary, she creates
large format paintings which are inspired by her intimate experience. Zourabova’s studies
as a theater set designer give her paintings a strong illusion of stark sets or artificial worlds.
Although the situations are banal, even boring, they look as if they were scenes reflected in
a strange mirror, were tension of everyday life is combined with romanticism of landscapes, composed from vivid colors and refined
patterns. Even narration in these paintings is part of an intriguing unknown language.
I start my working process with a sketch, which I draw on a pen-tablet. After the sketch is
finished, I print it out. Thus the final sketch becomes a hybrid from human and non-human
energies. Later I paint a large-scale canvas using pencil, brushes and acrylic paints. I cover
the pencil outlines with cellotape and fill the spaces with acrylic colors. I am attracted of
imitating by hands a machine process where a figurative, almost realistic painting is
created in contravention of traditional painting techniques.
In my scenes I often place self-portraits and the portraits of my close family members, thus
in one painting I combine intimate and global worlds. In my solo exhibition "Tide" (2010) I
created a number of large diptychs, where I repeated the famous children game of finding
differences between two almost identical pictures. On these diptychs I and my family
members can be found strayed in surrounding interiors.
In my exhibition “In search of a lake”(2010), which took place in Ben Gurion University of
the Negev, I raised a local aspect of provincial Israeli life. Taking as a basis a text about
some journey to the Negev, written in a childish manner in the name of an unknown tourist,
I created a kind of a tour combined from a number of paintings where real details spring out now here, now there.
