Anna Laour

The driving force behind my work is the sheer joy and pleasure I take in the creative process of imagination. The term ‘imagination’ is often used in the sense of ‘inventiveness’ as the skill to make new, original things, but alternatively it may also denote the ability to form mental images. I enjoy combining these two activities and giving material expression to them. Thus, my paintings are playful inventions of pictorial contents and motives using novel artistic forms and original graphic designs.
Frequently I find inspiration in literary texts as their narratives already result from the authors’ imaginative skills in the first place. However, the textual, rather than pictorial contents of these works serve only as a kind of ‘inspirational raw material’, to which I attach new meaning and which I interpret freely in the course of my own work, which brings about a substantial transformation of the initial subject matter. The resulting pictures have a riddle-like quality, and, in order for viewers to decipher them, they need to reconstruct and follow the transformative mental associations I employed in the first place. In this way, viewers re-create my pictures and thus become active parts of the artistic enterprise. By choosing ...

I am a graduate of the Muchina State Academy of applied Arts and Industrial Design in Saint Petersburg.