Polina Barskaya : WEST PALM BEACH I SALON

Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery is proud to present a presentation of paintings by the Brooklyn-based, Ukrainian-born artist Polina Barskaya. Typically depicting herself, her husband or her child within a domestic setting, Barskaya’s work explores moments of intimacy and isolation.

Barskaya’s compositions are derived from photographs that record her family’s everyday life and travels. She selects her scenes based on light, shapes and patterns, subtly distorting the scene through the process of painting. Morning Sun, for instance, captures the artist lounging on a sofa while her daughter sits on the floor in a patch of dappled sunlight. Both subjects are gazing back at the viewer with expressions that are both vulnerable and challenging while the watery brushstrokes that define the world around them create an impression of trembling movement – the flickering of light, time passing.

Indeed, in much of Barskaya’s work there is a contrast between the stillness of her figures and the movement of paint across the canvas. In Summer, we encounter the artist and her family seated barefoot at a table underneath the shade of a tree. Behind them a lush Mediterranean landscape shifts beneath a blue sky. It is a portrait of everyday familial love, of physical closeness and psychological distance. The places may change, time may pass, the artist suggests, but the family – the roles they each assume because they choose to or because they must – remains consistent.

Elsewhere, Barskaya appears alone. In Morocco, she lies naked on a daybed in a pose that both recalls and subverts the many female nudes from throughout art history. Lying with one hand across her stomach and the other lazily outstretched, she snarls at the viewer, challenging any assumption of seduction. This is, rather, a moment of repose snatched for the self, just as in Reading we find her in a sun-filled room, absorbed in a book.

These are paintings that relish in ritual, that invite us to tune into the rhythms of everyday existence and to allow each image to unfold gradually, brushstroke by brushstroke.