An accomplished abstract artist’s solo exhibition in east Auckland seeks to find a “sentience in surrounding landscapes” and connect with the natural world.
The showcase, entitled The Spell of the Sensuous, features works by Auckland artist Ekaterina Dimieva.
It opened in the Malcolm Smith Gallery at Uxbridge Arts and Culture in Howick on October 28.
Dimieva completed a Master of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts in 2020 and is a participant in the mothermother curatorial project.
She was a finalist in the 2022 and 2023 Estuary Art and Ecology Awards at Uxbridge Arts and Culture, the 2022 National Contemporary Art Awards staged at Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato, and the 2021 Molly Morpeth Canaday Awards at Arts Whakatane.
Her work is included in various collections nationwide and abroad including the Wallace Arts Trust collection.
Working in oil on canvas, she presents 19 new works at the exhibition in Howick exploring new ways to see and connect with the natural world.
Her adventurous abstract visions find a sentience in surrounding landscapes and express the essence of a “more-than-human” world with shapes and sounds twisting, twitching, swerving, switching, rippling and swelling.
Dimieva says she identified a “desire to connect with the world around us, through themes of dreaming, yearning and sensation”.
“These visions of sensation offer an opportunity to reconnect with the sensuous world.
“The world as we organically experience it in its enigmatic multiplicity and open-endedness, the world as we live it, prior to any judgement we might have about it.”
Her exhibition takes inspiration from United States ecologist and philosopher David Abram, whose work celebrates the sensual realm of life on Earth and offers a bridge to that “more-than-human” world, considered by him to be “the commonwealth of breath”.
Uxbridge director Paul Brobbel says Dimieva’s paintings “take that invitation with confidence”.
Her works in The Spell of the Sensuous “are both tightly focused in their philosophical inquiry and generously painted with their expansive rendering of life as we feel it”, he says.
The showcase closes out the year’s exhibition programme at Uxbridge and is on public display until December 16. Entry is free.
