October 24 – November 30, 2024
Divine Observation moved between Neo-Surrealist dreamscapes stitched from pop culture, religious iconography, and personal history — beauty, motherhood, and relationships refracted through a persistent sense of standing between two worlds.
Inga Khurieva: Divine Observation presented a stunning contemporary tableau featuring pop culture, religious and historic imagery rendered in Neo-Surrealist dreamscapes. Born in a small village in Russia, and based in the United States since 2013, Khurieva’s dreamscapes offered intimate perspectives on themes such as beauty, motherhood, and relationships. Figures were often highly detailed and imbued with emotion, with some fading into the background. This cast an unsettled feeling of inhabiting two realities, or two realms. Inga noted that the overlap of spiritual and physical realms manifested in her compositions, reflecting that the “…aim [is] to evoke a sense of disorientation, fragmented reality, the state in between worlds.” Works such as Apparition offered a Chagall-esque take on a religious awakening equally influenced by Surrealist approaches to painting. A partially nude figure stood at the end of a table, where dishes encircled the table, suspended in a seaside scene where the viewer was directed to the Madonna and Child appearing, riding a white horse and flanked by fruits. A fever pitch of flora and fauna arose from the picture plane, with a lack of depth in the figures hinting at pastiched imagery of a dreamlike state forming the dissolution of logic.
Khurieva’s imagery found its zenith in the balance between individual elements in these paintings and each work’s overall composition. Where curvilinear, voluminous figures held space at the center of these artworks, the expressions and appearances of these figures varied significantly. Beauty and truth could be found in the fragmented forms Khurieva presented, offering a reality more aligned with our perception of the world around us than the world as it is. Inga Khurieva: Divine Observation brought a sense of mystery and desire to contemporary art, culminating in an elegiac homage to the world we inhabit as our secret selves.
Works in the Exhibition
Divine Observation was on view at VillageOneArt, 150 West 25th Street, Suite 403, New York, from October 24 to November 30, 2024. For inquiries regarding available works by Inga Khurieva, please contact info@villageoneart.com.