Natalia Avdeeva

Natalia Avdeeva is a London-based Russian artist. She is a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI), the recipient of both Russian and British awards, prizes including the Windsor, Newton Young Artist Award (2011), and the Royal Society of Marine Artists, Young Artist Award (2016). She was shortlisted in BBC's Show Me, the Monet' series in 2013.

Natalia Avdeeva's works are huge, powerful landscapes with vast skies and affecting vistas. Each is a piece unique, based on plein air studies and has been created using an innovative technique that combines painting with print-making technology.

Painting these vast skies seems to come instinctively to the artist who was born, and grew up, in the Altai region of Russia, in Southern Siberia, where the borders of Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia meet. Altai is a majestic land of immense proportions and extreme climates – exceptionally hot summers and winters where the temperature regularly drops below -40ºc. The boundless skies, the mountains and glacial lakes of the region's natural environment provided the inspirational backdrop for the artist's childhood where her first job was picking herbs in the mountain passes for the local shaman. This natural influence is clearly evident in her work today and she describes her sense of being “in dialogue with the natural world, with the air, the sky."

The daughter of an artist father and an architect mother, Natalia Avdeeva had a hunger for creative expression from a young age and trained as a painter at the Barnaul School of Fine Art in Siberia, Russia. She gained an MA in English and German teaching at Barnaul State Teacher Training University After graduation she moved to St. Petersburg and worked as a trained tour guide to the city's Hermitage Museum and Summer Residencies, gaining an in-depth knowledge of Russian art. She moved to London in 2006 to study at Heatherleys School of Fine Art where she graduated in 2010 with diplomas in both Fine Art and Print-Making, and received the college's annual Print-Making Prize.

Since graduation from Heatherleys, she has exhibited widely in group and solo shows at London and international art fairs. Her work has been bought by public museums and private collectors across the world.