cherry pinocchio Drawing

Liubov Kucheriava (*1984, Simferopol, Crimea) translates directly to Love Curly. She is an Ukrainian artist, print maker and set designer. Liubov lived and worked in Kyiv and is currently based in Hamburg. Eroticism, beauty and emotional and sensual impact of shapes and colours have been crucial for her work for more than a decade, with media ranging from digital to painting to installation. The pandemic, however, has had a truly transformative effect on her practice. The artist started drawing by hand a lot, which allowed her to find a new level of freedom in self-expression and a new vector, a sexual act and meditative process for healing and coping with pain. In her own words: I have studied sexuality before, in digital works, but the experience of drawing with my hands made me feel so much joy from the process, it could be compared to a sexual act. This new experience, reminiscent of a mystical ritual, is a journey through consciousness, in which I meet mythical characters, participants of erotic fairy tales, whose characters are based on real people and events that fill my life. In the beginning, there is just a blank sheet, no prior sketching, composition or vision of what should be depicted. It’s hard to explain how it works, for me it is a sacral process. The whole composition is created in a matter of a few minutes, using colour and no further corrections. The technique is simple and similar to a child's drawing, strokes are like stitches, filling the space between the lines, creating a translucent texture with a primitive volume, which makes the image ghostly and unreal. Woven from dreams - that’s how you can describe my latest works. The process is reminiscent of embroidery, meditation, and therapy. Having finished, I can look at the work for hours, yet often the understanding of how I was involved is absent. Characters you can see in my works are guests in my life, teachers who help me to understand and accept myself, to cope with the pain that came with the outbreak of the war, the pain of a broken heart.