Karina Eibatova is a visual artist who has previously published work on our website and has also appeared in Juxtapoz, the New York Times, Wired, and The Verge. She has shown her artworks in Vienna, Berlin, Tokyo, London, and Los Angeles. Karina, born in St. Petersburg during the USSR’s twilight, has pursued her passion for art and established an international career and academic trajectory from a young age.
Karina’s first collaboration with a UK company was with Atlantic Records in 2010. The artist created for the Versaemerge “Fixed At Zero” disc. The popularity of Karina’s graphics in the early 2010s brought her many projects around the world at the very beginning of her artistic career.
In 2014, Karina studied at Central Saint Martins in London on the Fine Arts 4D faculty, where she had her first experience of British culture.
Solos show Project Space 1, AUP, Plymouth
Later in 2020, she did a cover for the fabulous British musician Tom Adams, which will only be released this year. Later, Karina pursued her second Master’s degree at the Art University Plymouth in the Southwest of the UK. There, she reached a new level of creativity, where her practice took on a more personal and profound approach: her paintings increased in size, and from watercolour and pencil graphics, she began to focus more on oil painting.
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Renowned artist Richard Kenton Webb, who is an award-winning artist and educator with over 30 years of extensive experience at institutions including The Slade School of Fine Art, admires Karina’s work, and he has left a review of Karina’s last exhibition.
What am I considering when I encounter Eibatova’s visual poetry? A sublimity of mind and the genuine ambition of wonder, that has been my companion when engaging with this painter’s vision. A vision that is both compelling, fresh and unnerving. I am not comfortable or put at ease with these accomplished paintings. I am compelled to look, digest and converse with them face to face, to behold and hear their voice asking questions. They certainly ask why to any certainty.
Apocalyptical and visionary I write as words. We can discuss John Martin, J.R.R.Tolkien and Gray’s Anatomy as sources if necessary, for inspiration, yet we are certainly now in what painting is now, not in a past, but a forward thinking, inside cinema graphic questions of fiction that are rooted deep in nature. Where colour is used to carry a magnificent narrative, that speaks into the soul of the viewer from exquisite detail to flat colour. The Peter Lanyon eyes of Devon and Cornwall painting, makes me feel air-born in this diptych, that is beautifully original and statically poised. As a gull on the wing stationary high over hundreds of feet of cliff beside the ocean. It makes me understand being inside a thought.
It is a dial in slow motion, of a hope materializing in these paintings. Of being a witness inside a dream, and renewed because of it. Collectively the ten paintings in this exhibition organise a great sense of otherness shared. Yet at the same time of an odd private calm, that becomes when witnessing a flower open into its glory.
From the author’s manifesto
“Currently, my personal creative practice is centered on oil on canvas. I explore imagery drawn from nature, dreams and imagination and strive to create an immersive and contemplative experience for the viewer through color and symbolism. My painting is at the crossroads, somewhere abstract, in some places not so much: a landscape or a body, a stone or a tree. In my recent works I try to reflect the value of the human body and of life itself, without resorting to depicting human figures, I try to depict our inner world, a secret landscape full of organs and light. Through a combination of neon, dark and pastel colours I want to express a sense of hope”.
This year, Karina was awarded the “Artist of the Month” prize in Zima magazine, one of the most recognised Russian-speaking media projects based in London. One of her works is on display in the city centre of London this summer.
Karina Eibatova’s works combine tenderness, organicity, lightness of abstract forms, painted with special care, expression and force, a kind of rumbling, reminiscent of works about the terrible judgment of the English Romanticism artist John Martin. In her paintings there is a certain confidence, power and resilience of a soft, feminine flow of forms – not something corporeal, not something cloudy, not something earthy and tangible, not something airy and elusive. This remarkable balance of opposites allows the viewer to feel a profound visual comfort. The works envelope the beholder like a soft blanket and immerse him or her in other levels of this visual aesthetic, where he or she encounters an intense vitality, some even doom. One plunges into this painting like a cloud, which, while outwardly harmless, carries thunder and lightning. Karina has been shortlisted for the prize several times and we are delighted to finally present her with the award she deserves
Intriguingly, two individuals made a similar comparison with English painter, engraver, and illustrator John Martin, which prompts the audience to contemplate the relationship between the apocalyptic landscapes of the 19th century and Karina’s dramatic works.
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