Nadya Semchishina-Shtayer

Nadya Semchishina-Shtayer was born in 1978 and raised in the far north or Russia. Having spent all the childhood surrounded by snow and northern lights, Nadya says she can differentiate hundreds of shades of white, black and grey. At the age of 10 she moved with her family to Angola, experience that left her impressed by the diversity of the world. 

Back in Russia, she decided to go to art school and moved to Moscow at age 17. She studied design, photography, contemporary art. Her interest was focused in signs, narratives, connections and influences between form and its sense within its context in cultures, religions and everyday life. For a while Nadya worked as a multidisciplinary designer. While creating objects, furniture, clothes she was searching for the right metaphor to create additional meanings in everyday things.

In 2017 Nadya decided to return to art and invented her own style stream Preverbal symbolism which is the result and the best process of her life-time research. 4 main colors (white, black, silver and gold), basic forms, structures and light is what Nadya used to show her vision. She recently started to paint on the wood using self-made gesso she learned from exploring traditional Russian iconic paintings. In her manifesto she states: «I paint invisible. I paint energy, I paint God, I paint distant galaxies and stars, I paint micro and macrocosm. I paint it before it becomes material and can be described by words. I do it only because I can’t stop doing it.»