the turquoise ether magazine’s mission is to publish independent critical reviews of promising artists from over The Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)

Turquoise #10 — Inessa Garder (Russia)

Inessa Garder was born in Siberia, Russia in 1988. She obtained a degree in architecture and art from the Novosibirsk state university and a degree in interior design from Scuola Politecnica di design in Milan. She is fascinated by light and shadow. She paints to explore how an image can impact a viewer’s soul in positive and inspiring ways in the times of change.

Inessa is moved by unusual cultural and natural surroundings, but unlike a traditional landscape painter she would focus only on a small fragment of the river: enlarging it, obsessing over it, almost turning it into an abstraction or into a mood of a person. This way the river itself is an invitation for self-enquiry and experiment with truth.

The artist has started her career in London, where she had the first successful group shows with art collective Chrom Art and Tom Cox Gallery and became immersed in London’s art scene. Her experience in this vibrant inexhaustible city led Inessa to experiment with her techniques and to always see more than meets the eye in a landscape or an urban environment.

Inessa is influenced by the work of the famous German painter, Gerhard Richter, and takes his large versatile body of work as her permission to start each new series with yet another technique, giving herself the freedom to be inconsistent with her style for the sake of never-ending journey of exploration and re-inventing herself.

In her Indian series “Sacred Summer” Inessa observes water in its different states. She paints the flow of the Ganges in various times of the day and various seasons, allowing the fleeting moment to be captured and taken out of time, as if in meditation. She paints the fogs of Monsoon and the waterfalls. Inessa sees water as mystical substance that carries information through the ages and brings much needed healing to the world.

The series “Sacred Summer” draws upon Gerhard Richter’s “squeegee" technique, that creates a gestural blur by dragging paint across the canvas surface, obliterating, concealing, and distorting what lies beneath. Inessa explores this technique and creates her variation of the water-like blur by pouring paint, "squeegeeing” it, partially covering previous layers of metal leaf. Inessa continues this gestural painting tradition in order to leave space for spontaneity and a certain raw quality of her art. “This way it is more like nature. The intelligence behind creating the river, for instance, is so beyond our comprehension that the patterns of the currents seem spontaneous and random to us. I like to have this splendid randomness somewhere in my artworks, too” — she says.

Inessa’s next destination and inspiration is Morocco where she conceives new experiments and new version of herself. “These last few years have been very much about starting from scratch for many of us. I wish to show people that they can always start something new, something that they love and that challenging situations are mere invitations to step yet closer to one’s true essence.

Smile at an obstacle, for it is a bridge.”

Now Inessa is working towards creating her base studio in London, where her career once took off. She intends to keep experimenting freely and to continue Russian bold creativity and culture through her versatile series of paintings that will potentially help people integrate the difficult learning experiences, that we go through as a collective consciousness now, and to embrace healing and purpose.

Author ✍️ Ekaterina Udalova for turquoise ether magazine