Natalya Zaloznaya

Natalya Zaloznaya was born into the family of the renowned Soviet artist Nikolai Grigoryevich Zalozny (1925–1982), who would influence her career choice. In 1979 she graduated from the Aleksei Glebov Minsk Art College and then entered the Belarusian State Theater and Art Institute (now the Belarusian State Academy of Arts), graduating in 1985. In 1989 she received a scholarship for a prestigious residency at the Senezh House of Creativity run by the USSR Artists’ Union.

The beginning of Zaloznaya’s career coincided with significant social and political changes: the perestroika of the 1980s, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Belarus’s independence in 1991. This era of transformation provided the artist with a platform to operate in ever-changing contexts, with access to information, open borders, and the opportunity to experiment. Zaloznaya was one of the first Belarusian artists to move beyond painting, beginning in the mid-1990s to work with installation, video art, and conceptual art. While remaining devoted to the medium of painting, she experimented with surfaces, incorporating complex multilayered techniques into her works. The artist combined painting on canvas with collage, oil-soaked paper, scratched-away layers of paint, or sand or marble powder added to the ground. The works from this period are nearly abstract, with recognizable imagery playing only a supplementary role. Objects, architecture, and landscapes are meant to indicate depth and scale, leading the viewer beyond the physical space of the canvas. At the same time, the texture transformed the painting into an object.

This orientation towards “objecthood” logically led Zaloznaya to installation. In her work with this medium, she demonstrates an interest in the system of visual information and text. By making composite objects, she creates new contexts and meanings from ready-made elements.

The artist’s painting in the Zimmerli Art Museum collection Playing with Dice (ZAM, D10622) was created in 1990 after a visit to Jerusalem and was inspired by the New Testament story of the soldiers casting lots for Jesus’s clothes after his crucifixion. The artist, still a student at the Belarusian State Theater and Art Institute, produced a number of works inspired by Jerusalem: In addition to the Zimmerli’s Playing Dice, there is the Jerusalem Series, which consists of four paintings in a monochromatic palette of ochers, on paper glued to canvas. Zaloznaya won the Soros Foundation’s Eternal Cities competition, with an entire cycle of works dedicated to Jerusalem. The trip to Jerusalem was intended to result in an exhibition, which ultimately did not take place. These paintings display some of the characteristic elements of Zaloznaya’s work during this period: the movement toward abstraction, the combination of geometric motifs and expressive lines, and a dispersed pictorial field. Playing with Dice was created later and serves as an echo of that series.

Between 1988 and 1991 Zaloznaya taught at the Glebov school together with Igor Tishin (b. 1958). The artists married in 1990. The two were instrumental in initiating reforms to the art education system, which did not meet the demands of the time nor adequately prepare graduates to navigate the contemporary art environment. In 1992 Zaloznaya and Tishin were among the organizers of and participants in an important exhibition, Уроки нехорошего искусства [Uroki nekhoroshego iskusstva, Lessons of Bad Art]. This group exhibition showcased works by students expelled from the Belarusian State Academy of Arts and the Glebov school. At the time, students were usually expelled for pursuing modernist art or for criticizing artistic institutions.

In 1997 Zaloznaya received two international fellowships, at KulturKontakt in Vienna, Austria, and at Kunstlerhaus in Boswil, Switzerland. In 2000 the couple moved to Brussels, Belgium. In 2005 Zaloznaya’s work was shown at the 51st Venice Biennale in Italy.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the artist worked primarily with the surface and space of the canvas, as well as materiality and texture of colors, with almost no room for the human figure. In contrast, the series Present Continuous, produced in 2013, represents a notable shift in focus, with the human element becoming a prominent feature of her works. Typically, the figure appears as an anonymous hero in imagined circumstances, usually in motion, as in Present Continuous, as a part of collective actions, as in Collective Gesture Theatre (2015–16), or transformed into an object, as in the Souvenir series (2018–19).

An equally important aspect of Zaloznaya’s work is the use of photographic material as a basis for her painting experiments. Her radical use of color, as well as dynamic compositional organization and image structure, allows her to continuously transcend the narrow confines of the original image. As in her earlier works, Zaloznaya strives to transform layers of paint into a tangible surface. She paints over existing images, but ensures that their traces remain visible, bearing witness to what once was. Her works from 2010s also incorporate the element of time, which is always a challenging task for an artist working with flat two-dimensional images. Zaloznaya also often tackles the concept of time in her installations. The most striking examples are Diaries (2009), Library (2012), and Intermission (2016).

Following her divorce in 2015, Zaloznaya resided for several years in Montenegro, primarily in Budva and Kotor, where she was a member of the group Montenegro European Art Community. In 2016 she held a solo exhibition, Collective Gesture Theatre, at the Dukley Art Center in Kotor. Since 2022, she has been living in Genoa, Italy. In 2022 she participated in the Secondary Archive presented at Manifesta 14, entitled Good as Hell: Voicing Resistance, at the National Gallery of Kosovo in Pristina.

Mikhail Hulin

Photo portrait: courtesy of the artist