Anna
Kurkova

Born in 1994 in Grodno, Belarus, Anna Kurkova has been working and living in the UAE fro the last twelve years. Kurkova is the winner of Christo and Jeanne Claude Art Prize 2017. She holds MA in Art History (Sorbonne University), and BA in Visual Arts (New York University), and she works as a Mixed Media Arts Instructor at the New York University Abu Dhabi.

Kurkova’s practice straddles the intersection of painting and printmaking. Her work is motivated by the desire to understand and describe physical passage of time through visual storytelling. Kurkova is interested in recording the intense joy and sorrow of human relationships, its inevitable reverberations, through gestures and lines of restless bodies in motion – dancing, running, climbing, riding, wrestling and fighting. Kurkova’s practice is informed by archival photography and footage and is characterized by a radiant, vibrating color palette and dynamic, loose brushwork that contribute to a sensation of dream like landscape, at once wistfully familiar and intangibly distant. Her large monotype works draw from a wide array of photographic records from sailors bracing the waves of the Aegean, to children dancing in the sun. Blocks of color and line form into figures, blurry and abstracted as if looking out from an old photograph, yet alive, present and floating boldly through the frame.