Sveta Ivanova

Sveta Ivanova was born in St Petersburg in 1965. She graduated from the Secondary Art School of the Academy of Arts, then studied privately in St Petersburg and Amsterdam. She is a member of the Artists’ Union of Russia. Sveta specializes in easel graphic works, painting and book illustrations. She practices various artistic techniques such as oil painting, watercolor, Indian ink, collage, monotype. Sveta has had numerous personal exhibitions in Russia, France, Netherlands and Germany. Her works are held in art collections of the Dostoevsky Museum (St Petersburg), the French Institute, the publishing houses “Vita Nova”, “Inostrannaya Literatura”, “Novoe Literaturnoe Obozreniye” and private collections in 15 different countries. Ivanova is based in St Petersburg. Urban landscapes are one of the main themes of Sveta’s works. Her graphic works and paintings of St Petersburg, Amsterdam, Tbilisi and Moscow have been shown at personal and group exhibitions for many years. She is the author of the “Moika Non Stop” project which comprises over a hundred watercolors with the views of all the houses on the banks of the Moika River in St Petersburg. This project was exhibited in the St Petersburg Dostoevsky Museum (2006) and the Polezhaev Art Center (2017). A deluxe edition of the project is upcoming at “Dmitry Sechin Publishing House”. The artist's favorite subjects in painting and drawing are the cityscapes and fragments of the architecture of the past. She sees the city as a living organism that preserves memories of the past in its walls and stones and, in a way, prefigures the future of its inhabitants.In 2018 Sveta presented her graphic series “the 400 Blows” at the “I-gallery” in Paris. The project is dedicated to the Francois Truffaut film of same name. This is a series of Paris landscapes which show frames from the legendary film and also the places in the frames as they are sixty years later. Mascarons of St Petersburg and Paris – stucco moldings on buildings in the shape of a human or animal head – were featured in another important project by Sveta – “Mascarade - La Mascarade”. Monotypes with their images were acquired by the French Institute in St Petersburg in 2014. Later the artist used the same motive in oil on canvas works. These works were shown at the "I-gallery" in Paris and at the Polezhaev Art Center in St Petersburg in 2017.The mascaron theme is continued in an idea for a new project which Sveta is submitting to the Arte Laguna Prize competition.This project - Lost mascarons – intends to draw the viewer’s attention to the problem of destruction of architecture in St Petersburg, to the loss of monuments of world significance. The historical center of St Petersburg is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List, but many buildings are being demolished, reconstructed or are simply decaying due to their critical condition. The artist’s project dedicated to the lost mascarons already numbers over thirty objects. Sveta uses differently shaped canvases to paint the portraits of the creatures - the guardians of the vanishing beauty of our city - from the decayed St Petersburg facades, as if they were alive. Here realistic painting is a way of at least preserving their memory. The curator of the project the St Petersburg artist Alexandre Dashevskiy defines the goal of it as following.
“Mascarons that used to be a whim of architect’s imagination, a dream materialized in stucco, plaster and stone, now are in the middle of a devilish death-dance. The poverty, the climate, negligence and corruption took their toll, and covered those who survived with cavities and losses. Sveta Ivanova takes these victims of the dreary and merciless Russian three-dimensionality back into their native element – the plane, the state of a drawing, a project, an archive, a museum.There, beyond the reach of a hypocrite, a developer and rain, they find their place in the heavenly architecture of the memory. Sveta Ivanova is also known as a book illustrator who has worked for the leading publishing houses of Russia. Her first significant work in book illustration was the book by the emigrant writer M.Ageev “Novel with Cocaine” (“Vita Nova”, 2008). It was the first illustrated edition of this novel. She also illustrated a sizeable deluxe book of “French Fairy Tales” (2013). The AST Publishing House issued two books of fairy tales by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya with illustrations by Sveta Ivanova. The book by Vadim Levin and Renata Mukha “Between Us” (the “Octopus” Publishing House, 2009) illustrated by Sveta Ivanova received the first prize in the children’s book category at the international book fair Non-Fiction in Moscow in 2009. It was later republished and presented at the Bologna Children’s Book in 2011. The book by Boris Pasternak “Menagerie” illustrated by Sveta Ivanova was also presented at the Bologna Children’s Book in 2016.