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BIO Julia Kuzina was born in 1987 in a small town of Pskov Region, Russia. Since 2005 she lives in St. Petersburg. Julia graduated with a degree in marketing. Julia began painting in 2014. In 2015, she started working on a series of paintings in the genre of pop surrealism. These paintings were noted by the curators of Saatchi Art online gallery, participated in exhibitions in Russia and the USA. In 2020, she began working on the Shards series. The paintings of this series visualize an unsettling feeling in anticipation of destruction, the birth of a post-apocalyptic world, and at the same time cause conflicting feelings of peace and anxiety. The artist's paintings are in private collections in the USA, Canada, Germany, Great Britain and Russia. ______________ ARTIST STATEMENT I explore the relationships between human and nature, themes of their vulnerability. Plants, people and animals in the paintings are not only connected, but also have common properties, can be transformed into each other. Some characters move from painting to painting, creating their own universe with their own rules. Each painting tells a story. The main character of the paintings is a girl with sad eyes, created on the line between the beautiful and the terrible. I use pain and love, beauty and ugliness, evil and kindness in every painting. These combinations are designed to provoke a mixture of conflicting feelings to the viewer. The subjects of earlier works are darker so its flat primitive style is intended to isolate the viewer from their pain. With changing the direction from the fragility of human to the vulnerability of nature, the painting style is transformed to more realistic. In recent works, I use translucent beads on oil paintings because I’m interested in going beyond the boundaries of the canvas and explore the play of light and shadow on the painting when adding additional objects.