Victoria Kosheleva was born in Moscow, to a family of artists. She studied at the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow, graduating from the faculty of monumental and decorative painting in 2012. In 2013 she had an internship at the Parsons School of Design. Victoria lives and works in Paris and Moscow.
In her artistic practice Victoria merges contemporary and classical imagery. In one of her interviews, she described her works as ‘cyber-expressionism’. The subconscious plays an important role in Victoria’s practice. In her paintings she tends to create surreal worlds consisting of memories and fantasies, imagery and landscapes which are often taken out of their familiar context. She frequently uses images of phone or cinema screens, as well as mirrors – all of which work as a portal to the theatre of the unconscious.
The Fatamorgana project was born in 2016, as a part of Victoria’s personal exhibition in Moscow. Part of it – the “Screen” installation – had been shown at the fābula gallery stand at Cosmoscow contemporary art fair in September 2020. This object had been created within the gallery’s programme of collaborations “fabula x”. Sails, which are used in it, are often associated with freedom, borderlessness and the constant drive forward. The metal frame to which the sails are attached is a contrasting element – it simultaneously supports the construction and establishes the limits.
The screen’s function is to serve as a temporary wall: to cover and protect one from the world. For Victoria this object is a metaphor of the boundary, which ‘separates’ our comfort zone from the surrounding space.
Amongst the other semantic prototypes of the Fatamorgana project there is another ubiquitous yet sacral construction – the glasshouse, which can be found on almost any countryside property in Russia. This object serves to create an ideal milieu for the plants to exist.
The variegated multicolored mosaic of windsurfing sails is an allusion to the Gothic stained-glass tradition: objects which draw not only the physical border between the worlds, but also the transcendental one.
