Bullfinches
In Olga Chernysheva’s graphic works, familiar elements of the urban landscape — its characters, scenes, and objects — cease to function as assumed components of the everyday backdrop. Instead, the mundane becomes a self-sufficient subject of the artist’s observation, one that resists the conventional division between foreground and background.
Chernysheva’s protagonists — whether a security guard, courier, elderly woman at a market, or a well-dressed lady walking her dog — appear detached from their contextual surroundings. Presented in compositions stripped of detail, they are suspended in an undefined space. Artist and viewer thus occupy a shared position of the observer, adjusting their visual focus to engage with fragmentary images and the distance they evoke.
A recurring motif in Chernysheva’s practice is her attention to the geometry of the everyday — to the unintentional patterns formed by the outlines of people, animals, and birds. Careful observation of these compositions reveals poetic visual combinations that unfold under the artist’s sensitive gaze.
The graphic sheets are part of a small edition of silkscreen prints produced by the printmaking laboratory PiranesiLAB in 2024. In Chernysheva’s practice, the choice of printing technique is always closely aligned with the precision of her conceptual intent and her vision of the final result. Silkscreen printing on thin tracing paper creates delicate folds, producing a wrinkled surface that resembles either cracked ice or the marks on a studio window, behind which bullfinches begin to appear.
A defining element of Chernysheva’s approach to printmaking is the inner necessity to intervene in each impression — to introduce fragments of her distinct artistic gesture. This gesture is subtle and restrained, yet capable of delivering a precise visual characterization of an image without excess. In *Bullfinches*, the silkscreen base outlines the birds in shades of grey, while their vivid red breasts were applied by hand, one by one, by the artist herself.
Artist
In 1986, she graduated from the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, and in 1996 — from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam.
Selected solo exhibitions in recent years:
2025: Street of Sleep, GES-2, Moscow
2024: Re-animations, Iragui Gallery, Paris
2024: Houseplant is leaving, DIEHL, Berlin
2024: Unpacking Things, LANG, Amsterdam
2024: Being Daphne, Foxy Production, New York
2020: Grids & Rips, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw
2019: Public Feeding, DIEHL, Berlin
2019: Autoradio, Foxy Production, New York
2018: Ordered Equivocations, Kohta, Helsinki
2017: Chandeliers in the Forest, Secession, Vienna
2017: Settings, Iragui Gallery, Moscow
2017: Cactus Seller and others, DIEHL, Berlin
Her works are held in the collections of:
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow;
The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg;
Moscow Museum of Modern Art;
National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow;
The Collection of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Moscow;
Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, USA;
Library of MoMA, New York, USA.
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