Leah Larisa Bunshaft (Dizlarka)

Artist Statement

The core element of my artistic practice is the experience of facing an insecure world, of being aware of my own vulnerability. This is my personal experience, and at the same time a universal one. In my paintings, I strive to create a mythologised world in which one can visualis...

Artist Statement

The core element of my artistic practice is the experience of facing an insecure world, of being aware of my own vulnerability. This is my personal experience, and at the same time a universal one. In my paintings, I strive to create a mythologised world in which one can visualise a peaceful serenity and reconciliation with the world. In my virtual spaces danger is sublime, abstracted, and not really at all threatening. Unfolding vulnerability, turning it into an object of contemplation, I invite my viewer to perform a mental experiment and do the same with their own experience.

When creating and assembling a virtual mythogenic environment from fragments, I draw on the experience of surrealist thinking where meaning and particular aesthetics are seen in a defamiliarised form.

At the same time, I have inherited from the impressionist style, from the plasticity of the image, thanks to which the eye seems to be absorbed by the depicted world, while the imagination adds to it, giving it density, vividness and tangibility. For me this freedom of pictorial painting, open to dialogue with the viewer, is extremely important. I augment my practice with artefacts, found objects, integrating elements of meticulous craftsmanship into the painting. Each detail is like a singularity - it opens up new potential interpretations and sensations to the viewer's encounter with the painting.

In channelling my practice into a central topic of vulnerability, the fragility of the human, I explore visual culture and its interpretations, temporality practices, and the cycle structure that defines the dynamics of life itself. I am interested in the ways these separate threads intertwine, discovering common rhythmic shapes and resemblances.

Thus, I see time as a special entity, which I express symbolically in my paintings, whereas in my personal experience it is associated with a feeling of insecurity, of being unable to control my own life. Within this context I see the very human approach revealed in the constant striving to arrange and streamline the flows of time, to create a perfect computational intelligence. The element remains invincible, the human intention persists through the centuries and this opposition forms such a shaky and tense balance that is close to the experience of life itself.

Accumulating a variety of topics in the aesthetics of enigmatic realism, I invariably turn to an introspective optics. My art is an experience of seeing myself, sculpting my own identity, tracing the lines of femininity in my Self and my perception. The issue of identity is particularly important to me because, as a global person, I have long been deprived of a direct and singular belonging to a local culture. And this is another common symptom of our times