Mila Arbuzova

MILA ARBUZOVA
Mila Arbuzova was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russia in 1973.
Having graduated from Saint-Petersburg's University of Humanities and Social Sciences, she worked as a journalist at the different art and cultural magazines. At the same time she began her own artist's experiments.
Mila Arbuzova spent her childhood in the downtown of Saint Petersburg. Her family lived in a block of flats in Grazhdanskaya Street where, according to Dostoevsky's famous novel "Crime and Punishment", the old female moneylender killed by Rodion Raskolnikov used to live. In Soviet times guides often showed foreigners the place where the legendary murder occurred. Maybe this location of the native house made an influence on the future artist. The art work of Mila Arbuzova is essentially  "Saint-Petersburg's": lyrical, strict, sometimes - tragicomocal, philosophical, serious and absurdist in the same moment. It includes a wide range  of subjects: the sarcastic sketches in the spirit of "social art" as well as the magical  fantastic pictures together with free compositions combining parts of realistic images in a surrealistic manner.
Contemporary Russian Art despite its visual diversity tends to simplify so that its painting mainstream is ...