"Everything is multiplied by two, except fate and H20 itself..."
Joseph Brodsky
About the solo show ELEMENT: WATER of Olga Slobodkina-von Brömssen:
For some creative persons, the camera lens replaces a brush, pencil and pen. Olga Slobodkina-von Brömssen is a comprehensively gifted person. She translates, writes poetry, creates beautiful landscapes and graphic compositions in photography. One continues the other. The word flows smoothly into the image. Both in poetry and photography, Olga Slobodkina-von Brömssen strives primarily for self-expression, for philosophical understanding, but being squeezed by the procrustean bed of the laws of the above-mentioned arts, she does it in a few words, succinctly, generalizingly, and as if asserting that a Person is a child to whom the World has been handed over like a ball to a child: take it and play!
The element of water involves playing with the properties of water - fluidity, mobility, its movement and the ability to reflect, as in a mirror, everything that is in visual contact with water. The game can be continued further, placing photographic landscapes on the principle of the "jack", thus creating a new visual-virtual reality. The absence of "top" and "bottom" forces you to immerse yourself into the element created by the artist's inner vision and pushing the horizons of vision and comprehension for the viewer.
One of the main directions in the development of art photography is "graphics" - approaching the works of graphic artists, working with a "line", however, in the case of photography, a line found in nature. In her series of "graphic" works by Olga Slobodkina-von Brömssen appears as a refined master exploring the inexhaustible possibilities of Japonism: conciseness, accuracy, understatement, aestheticism are the components of her graphic series. Olga Slobodkina-von Brömssen prefers to work in series. Her arsenal includes not only the series "The Element of Water", but also "The Element of Stone", "The Element of Fire", etc.
Olga Slobodkina-von Brömssen continues the great traditions of photography - this, one might say, one of the youngest arts, whose representatives were the famous Edward Vanstone - experimenter and creator of abstract photography; Ansel Adams - photographer of nature, and, of course, Man Ray, A.Newman, A.Rodchenko, A.Shaikhet, B.Ignatovich, M. Nappelbaum and others . In general, this solo show of hers at the ASTI gallery can be attributed to the direction presented last year in London by a number of interesting expositions at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Serpentine Gallery - "Give & Take". The idea, however, is simple: a modern artist cannot but take, assimilate, and rely on everything that was created in art before and renew modern art.
We are sure that the audience who visit the exhibition of Olga Slobodkina-von Brömssen, in turn, will take and perceive the extraordinary art of the artist, enrich themselves internally and will have an aftertaste from this exhibition in their soul for a long time, as from a real extraordinary wine.
Natella Voiskunskaya, art critic, curator of the ASTI gallery