Masha Rudenko
Born in Taganrog, a scrappy Russian port city of 250,000 on the northern Sea of Azov, Masha Rudenko is a conceptual artist working across all media and disciplines: drawing, painting, photography, video and performance.
A shape-shifting chameleon, Rudenko specializes in depicting various alter-egos sourced from our collective Pop sub-conscious, infusing them with her own gritty hyper-realism in a not-so-steady state of equipoise. Rudenko’s medium is the blank slate of her own body.
Her core strategy, that of the cunning body snatcher constantly in search of iconic identities to embody and inhabit. Seamlessly slipping into one skin after another, Rudenko phase-changes from a feline & feral Grace Jones purring if not hissing at the camera, to the louche and famously dissolute Jim Morrison in decaying, Dionysian repose; from depicting Frida Kahlo’s tragic backstory in a single telling painterly tableau, to sourcing the odd surreal flourish in Dali’s repertoire of same.
The miracle & magic to be found in her work routinely manifests in the laser-like focus & precision with which she zeros in on the minutiae of a single gesture. Add all these gestures up, super-charge them with a current of ecstasy, and Rudenko’s signature brand of sorcery slowly reveals itself to the viewer as actor, inspiration, muse and material all slowly recombine into a perfect unity – what one might call, the “stalker sublime”.
In 2016 the Women In Film (WIF) organization included Masha Rudenko as one of the panelists to represent her work on transformation. In June 2017 Allouche gallery New York presented Masha’s work at the group show with the contemporary artists – Swoon, Rusudan Khizanishvili, Jessica Lichtenstein, Ray Ceasar, Faile and others.
