Blue Sky Red, Veronica Smirnoff
@ Cromwell Place, London SW7 2JE
21 - 26 May
A Paramount Thought, Egg tempera on panel, 28 x 22 cm
Candida Stevens Gallery is delighted to present Blue Sky Red, the largest solo exhibition of Veronica Smirnoff’s work to date in the UK. Offering a unique opportunity to trace the artist’s development over the last twenty years, this exhibition showcases the artist’s expertise and commitment to the medium of egg tempera painting. Generally associated with Byzantine icons and the Italian pre-Renaissance, there are few contemporary artists using egg tempera as their primary medium today and even fewer who use it as experimentally and with as much versatility as Smirnoff. From small-scale portraits to fantastical landscapes, these are works that challenge contemporary preconceptions of the medium and draw the viewer into a realm of curious, open-ended and fantastical narratives
Blue Sky Red, A solo show by Veronica Smirnoff
4 Cromwell Place, London
22 - 26 May (21 May by appt)
Wing Gallery and Gallery 12
See below for Opening hours.
Firebird, Tapestry with hand-stitch, 190 x 160 cm
The exhibition also includes the first showing of three large-scale embroideries that the artist has commissioned over the last year, exploring the effects of translating her work into textile. In each case, she has selected a small panel painting to be digitally printed onto a large piece of fabric, which has then been hand-embroidered to emphasise detail and form. Since egg tempera does not allow for the same opportunity to build texture in the same way as, say, impasto painting in oils, producing these works has been a joyful experience for the artist and provide a wonderful opportunity to see her work in an entirely new context.
Read full essay by Isabella Joughin on our website.
A Night Flight, Egg tempera on panel, 27 x 27 cm
"Only a mind pledged to curiosity; a vision bound to reinvention; and a creative vigor that thrives on personal and cultural archeology, could traverse such artistic terrain and conjure these captivating inner worlds and outer horizons. If Smirnoff’s beguiling panoramas leaves us wondering, questioning and re-evaluating our relationships with time, existence and knowledge, then that is as it should be. She delivers us to the brink of the known, and she equips us to venture into whatever lies beyond."
(Concluding paragraph of essay by art critic Darren Jones. Full essay can be read online and in the catalogue. )
Press Release
London, United Kingdom, May 2024 – Candida Stevens Gallery is delighted to present Blue Sky Red at Cromwell Place, the largest solo exhibition of Veronica Smirnoff’s work to date in the UK.
Blue Sky Red presents the latest series by British-based Russian-Born artist’s practice, featuring vibrant new paintings and drawings bursting with colour and confidence, such as Thinking Red (2024) portraying a female figure in a voluminous crimson dress. Doing away with the constraints of ‘high’ and ‘low’ subjects, Smirnoff blends the sacred and the profane, the sublime and earthly, pulling the viewer into a realm of magic and mystery, illusory and irresistible – guided by Smirnoff’s boundless imagination and ultimately by the paint itself.
The exhibition also includes three new, never-seen-before large-scale tapestries commissioned by the artist over the last year, translating her mesmerising visual language into the tactility of textiles. Each embroidery references a small panel painting by Smirnoff, digitally printed onto the fabric first, then embroidered by hand to explore sculptural and textural possibilities, while still employing an ancient artistic technique with its own long history rooted in collective storytelling.
Over two decades, Smirnoff has become a master of egg tempera painting – a technique associated with Byznatine and pre-Renaissance art. She began to train in the ancient art making method – widely practiced until the 15th century when it was replaced with oil paint – while Smirnoff was a student at the Slade School of Art. But it was the Russian monks at the Optina Pustyn Eastern Orthodox Monastic centre, on the outskirts of Moscow, that helped Smirnoff finesse her skills in her chosen medium, studying how to grind precious stones to make her own pigment powder, a traditional process that is completed by adding white wine and egg yolk. The quick-drying egg tempera is then applied laboriously, in thin layers, to gessoed wood panels; Smirnoff still sources the panels used for her paintings from the monastery, where they are made and blessed by the monks – adding a spiritual layer before the paint.
Smirnoff’s fascinating engagement with egg tempera and her careful choice of materials is the starting point for understanding her lucid, jewel-like paintings. Intimate in scale and rich in details and symbolism, Smirnoff draws on her own life experiences and memories, as well as a voracious range of cultural and political references, and taking inspiration from throughout art history, from Persian miniature painting to Japanese screens and Chinese scroll painting, to religious iconography and folklore.
Cromwell Place Opening Hours:
Tue: Appointments Only
Wed - Sat: 10.00am - 6.00pm
Sun: 10.00am - 4.00pm
