Kristina Okan

Kristina Okan is an award-nominated international visual artist, born in Russia in 1991. She lives and works in Berlin and Moscow.

Okan received her Master of Arts Degree from Stroganov`s Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts in Moscow. She has exhibited her works in solo and group exhibitions across Europe and Asia, including the UK, Italy, Greece, Germany, China.

She was nominated for a prestigious international ceramic art award, “Blanc de Chine," in 2019 and awarded an honorable mention from Cluj Ceramic Biennale.

Her works can be found in the collections of Quanzhou Porcelain Road Art Development Center (Beijing) and private collections.

Artist statement 

In my works, I examine the beauty and fragility of the natural world. My sculptural language is rooted in classical European traditions of porcelain art, engaging with themes of beauty, biomorphism, and notions of the micro and macrocosm. One of my main ideas is to capture the transformation of ephemeral brittle beauty into petrified porcelain forms that will stay like little eternal monuments of delight and celebration of life.

In my artworks, I often challenge the viewer to find their own meaning, wake up feelings and emotions, associations and fantasies, which are more covert, carrying some secrets and mysteries. I am creating a private dialogue between an object and the viewer.

Inspired by Renaissance traditional still lives with their visual relish of objects, I create sensual biomorphic shapes formed from repetitive and fractal modules.

My sculptures are made mainly of porcelain because of their unexampled and unique qualities as a clay body: its subtlety and fragility. Smooth surface quality refers to something mysterious which intrigues me. This special material is able to give you a sense of texture due to its pure whiteness, astonishing translucence, and ability to take on fine details.

Although my works focus on nature and the body, they are never figurative and poise geometric abstract matter.