Among the mountains, 2022

Liza Petrova  

Liza Petrova (b. 1993, Russia) is a Belgrade-based figurative artist, working with painting in mixed media, combining traditional oil techniques with innovative materials such as alcohol ink on plastic. In her work, she seeks to capture the emotional and social landscapes of a rapidly changing world. A graduate of the Moscow Architectural Institute and former urban planner, she explored several visual disciplines before turning to contemporary painting, including illustration and digital character design. Her practice centered on the transformative potential of materials – from early experiments with diluting gouache and acrylic to her current use of alcohol ink and dissolved oil.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My background is in urban planning and architecture, and it continues to shape the way I approach art. It taught me to think through systems of relations and scales, rather then isolated forms. I am interested in how personal, social, historical, and spatial meet within one image. My interest in continuity and complex global systems is close to Aby Warburg's idea of the migration of images, which understands visual motifs as mobile carriers of emotional memory that travel across time, space, and media, continually transforming in new historical contexts and reflecting changes in human society. This is why I work with classic subjects such as the portrait, the nude, or the figure in a landscape: timeless and ever-evolving, they create a conversation between artists throughout history.

My work examines how the language of contemporary art interacts with and reshapes these traditional subjects and materials. I work in mixed media, primarily combining alcohol ink and oil on plastic. Through symbolic imagery, I explore how personal inner mythology reflects broader social and historical contexts. My work begins with the tension between a person and the space around them. In my portraits, the figure affects the space around it, distorting it, extending the personality beyond the body, and reflecting its inner state.

More recently, my long-standing interest in the relationship between body and space has led me to a new formal question: the plasticity of the painting surface. I am interested in preserving what Clement Greenberg identified as painting's defining condition – flatness – while shifting the work out of its fixed relation to the wall. Rather than reintroducing illusionistic depth or treating painting as sculpture, I want the surface itself to bend, fold, and shape perception as a spatial structure.

In my practice, material occupies the central role. Material is already a bearer of cultural memory and emotion. Oil and canvas are inseparable from European culture. Alcohol ink functions for me both as a contemporary material and as a reference to ancient ink-drawing practices, while plastic marks an irreversible transformation of nature and culture. In my process, much of the work is handed over to the material itself. It speaks through abstraction and an approach of controlled accidents. I like to dissolve and split material into its basic particles. I experience this as both a liberation of the material and as a practice of sharing responsibility with the universe. For this reason, process is the central part of my work.