Ksenia Pasyura

Ksenia Pasyura is a visual artist and painter living and working in London.
In her practice, she explores the subject of the body, rendering it strange, grotesque, and disfigured. Preoccupied with the themes of the psyche affecting the condition of human embodiment, Pasyura uses humor and carnivalesque motifs to further explore this subject.
With the wide but simultaneously foreboding smiles, enlarged feet, and twisted bodies, Pasyura’s painted figures are stripped of almost any sexual signifiers, making them appear otherworldly and cartoonish. Their appearance suggests that the body is not only a vessel or tool for biological functions but that it can also display the workings of the human psyche and emotional interior. Their folded limbs, small heads, and bruised skin make one feel almost uncomfortable, making the viewer examine their own skin, corporeality, and the state of being in the body. The figures become symbols of agitation, pain, and inner emotional processes that are not separate from the body.
Moreover, in her practice, Pasyura also addresses the issue of ugliness. Today’s popular culture often dismisses ugly, disabled, deformed, and hurt bodies, but her paintings, through their large scale and vivid color palette, make us unable to ignore those seemingly ugly figures and we meet with an ambiguous juxtaposition of repulsion and attraction. Once encountered with the picture, however, we notice the humor and joyfulness of the paintings’ protagonists.

Submitted by Modern Fine Art