Ariadna Shmandurova is a fine artist and designer who lives and works in Amsterdam.

Ariadna Shmandurova was born in Russia in a family of well-known painters. She spent her childhood surrounded by artists and other creative people, which in many ways predestined her life.

She got her classical education in one of the most strict and famous art colleges in Moscow, in 1989 she enrolled into faculty of interior design at Stroganov Moscow State Academy of Arts and Industry. After that she moved to the Netherlands, where in 1995 she graduated from the Minerva Academy of the Arts in Groningen.

Ariadna lives and works in Amsterdam. Starting from the year 2000 she successfully combines two activities – interior designer and artist. But she considers namely fine arts to be her true calling.

When Ariadna had developed her style, she had had 11 years of intensive study behind her: the traditional academical schooling in the fine arts, the European education as a designer, as well as a lot of experience in many genres, forms and techniques of the fine arts – ranging from drawing to installations.

Nevertheless, she had made a very unexpected choice – she started to work in an intimate graphical technique, using sessions with posing models as a source of inspiration. But her method underwent severe transformations. Ariadna chose a laconical, but at the same time emotional language. The main elements of her characteristic style – a line with contrasting, minimalistic coloring. The artist often uses the contrast of a white piece of paper with red (series Red, 2016) or black paint (series Black 2016, 2017), in her recent work appear more complex color schemes.

Ariadna consciously refused the mimetically, imitative principle – she doesn’t strive towards an accurate depiction of the model, but rather wants to depict an unconscious stream, a certain emotional state, which is reached through dialogue with the model during the posing session, and expressed  in conventional anthropomorphic images. This can be an outline of a figure, a torso, a head, a masculine or feminine image. In her recent works the artist usually depicts two figures in interaction. But the expressive signature of the author stays the same – a vibrant, lively, pulsating line, sometimes tangled, sometimes calm, fragile, barely outlining the sandy, seemingly elusive or disappearing image.

The very first graphical series Identity was created in 2000 and became the point of departure in the oeuvre of the artist. It was at this moment, during the habitual drawing of the model in full scale, that unexpectedly appeared a series of heads of men with open mouths sending off to the famous The Scream by Munch and to the tragically bent backward heads of the heroes of Guernica by Picasso. The posing session turned into a spiritual seance or meditation, where the artist appears in the role of a guide, a medium, and where the streams of energy received by her are transferred on to the paper. Such an intuitive and spontaneous working method with the unconscious seems similar to the “automatic writing”, which was so beloved back in the days by the surrealists.

In her recent work, Ariadna distances herself more and more from her earlier images, she exaggerates the lines and forms, and turns them into abstract compositions. The new series are executed on bigger sheets of paper, the thin lines made with a pen are conjoined with energetic strokes, executed with a wide brush, which reminds of the graphics of Pierre Soulages and the Japanese expressionism of the 1950’s-1960’s.

One of the main recurrent themes in the art of Ariadna Shmandurova is the Modern Man with his inner trauma’s and unsolved dualism of Eros and Thanatos – the striving for an absolute, ecstatic joy and absolute suffering, sexual energy and death, the wish for unity and never-ending solitude, beauty and ugliness intertwined.

Education:

– 1995 Graduated from the Minerva Academy of the Arts in Groningen, The Netherlands

– 1992 Graduated from the Moscow Higher Art School B. Stroganovskoe MGHPU

– 1988 Graduated from the Moscow Art School Memory 1905 MGAHI