In Search of Balance N3, 2022
Anna Kazmina

Anna Kazmina is a Russian artist born in 1987 who lives between Moscow, Russia and Beijing, China. She was graduated from Department of Art, Moscow State University and got a Ph.D. in Fine Arts from Beijing Normal University. She is member of the Russian Artists' Union. She participated at the Moscow Blazar Youth Art Fair, was awarded from the first prize winner of the Titian International Prize of Beijing Academy of Art, she has been nonmined of the Moscow Zverev Art Prize and attended at the Beijing Biennale, as well as many exhibitions in China and Russia. 

Anna Kazmina's art works provoke to think about the philosophical questions of memory, time, creativity process, consciousness and subconsciousness. Also her art works focus on the human nature itself, as well as all the complex inner relationships between Human and Reality. The creative process for the artist becomes an ideal condition to get behind the scenes of the aestheticized modernity and gets to rethink the inner essence of things and expand the potential knowledge of the world. Anna's art works show a desire to break free from the shackles of commercialism's images imposed by society and other kinds of stereotypes that make paintings transcendent: recover the hidden possibilities of human being, things and find their interactions to each other.

Working in painting, graphics, sculpture, video, installations and other mediums, Anna combines and collides different logics and approaches. She moves from focus on a small scale to a large one, captures variety of different meaning structures into the concentrated single thought space. By connecting the multiplicity of the elements, objects are transformed into organic structures, similar to centuries of minerals, where the universe and humans are transformed into a single complex organism. For example, particles of light and color, sounds, objects, natural phenomenon's animal life and the world of people in Anna's works are in perpetual motion and connection, permanently building the improvement of the world. Here, metaphysics interact constantly, are inextricably linked to physics, and materials are indivisibly linked to thought. The artist, as an alchemist looking for his precious element, produces all kinds of interactions with materials or more concretely, precisely, finds contact and dialogue with the materials. We will see crashed porcelains patterns, crumpling drawings, tearing existing images, cutting off many layers of paint, melting and sculpting new configurations, happened mechanical and human-machines technical symbiosis. For example, Anna processes already completed drawings of her by converting them into pixels via photography and a computer, then she accepts to make various changes on them with very sensual textures: prints with manual hatching and very brightly colorful artificial plants, scattered QR codes and thick pasty paint strokes. 

The artist Anna Kazmina describes the common concept of her art in this way: “In my creation process, I explore the relationship between individuals, human and society, person and reality. I think that the models of people, society and the world can be expressed as a Spherical shape (that means it has infinite opposite qualities); as a Dynamic form (which means permanent reconstruction), and as a Creative configuration (and therefore it is destructive and creative at the same time). All of these have various functions and multiple layers, which can be accumulated and expanded. The Reality is a powerful and giant structure, a living organism in which, through squeezing, scratching, melting, breaking, crushing and perhaps stroking, will occur destruction with further formation.

The main creative method that I used is the Primary creation, then follows the Destroying stage and, lastly, Transformation, the third step, also called the Second creation of the forms. That means we are constantly moving from creation to destruction, the eternal “deconstruction" of what already exists, transcodes content's concentration into new forms and semantic configurations, making all of this transition, our Reality, Society, Human beings, everything switched into another model of Being".