{"id":3845,"date":"2025-04-15T05:05:50","date_gmt":"2025-04-15T05:05:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/15\/review-ella-kruglyanskaya-shadows-at-londons-thomas-dane-gallery\/"},"modified":"2025-04-15T05:05:55","modified_gmt":"2025-04-15T05:05:55","slug":"review-ella-kruglyanskaya-shadows-at-londons-thomas-dane-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/04\/15\/review-ella-kruglyanskaya-shadows-at-londons-thomas-dane-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: \u201cElla Kruglyanskaya, Shadows\u201d at London\u2019s Thomas Dane Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ella Kruglyanskaya, Lemondrama (After Manet)<\/span><\/em>, 2024; oil on canvas, 96.5 x 86.4 cm., 38 x 34 in. \u00a9 Ella Kruglyanskaya \/ Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and Bortolami Gallery, New York. Photo: Mark Woods<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Ella Kruglyanskaya loves lemons. They appear in several of her new paintings on display at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London, but most memorably in Lemondrama (After Manet)<\/i>, in which the foreground is occupied with a sliced and whole lemon next to a knife. The crudely painted dead body lies secondary in the background. Lemon drama, indeed.<\/p>\n

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Such wry humor runs throughout Kruglyanskaya\u2019s work. Perhaps that\u2019s the key to her success. The Latvian-born artist, now based in Brooklyn, is certainly enjoying a busy year. \u201cShadows\u201d is the first in a series of three exhibitions of Kruglyanskaya\u2019s work across the year, with the second opening in Basel at Contemporary Fine Arts in June and the third in the autumn in New York at Bortolami Gallery.<\/p>\n

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SEE ALSO: <\/i><\/b>Noah Davis\u2019 Legacy Lives On in the Barbican\u2019s Poignant Retrospective<\/i><\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Kruglyanskaya has said that she wants her paintings to feel cinematic, to hold suspense, seduction and scenery within the frame. There\u2019s undeniable drama in many of the paintings in \u201cShadows,\u201d seen most starkly in Everyone and Their Mortality<\/i>, her sardonic memento mori depicting a skeleton lying among aubergines slithered like slugs (plus half a lemon, but of course). Yet, for all its melodrama, Kruglyanskaya\u2019s work winks at its viewer, showing off its artifice. We\u2019re continually being reminded that we\u2019re looking at a painting. Beneath the aubergines and skeleton, Kruglyanskaya includes a painted \u2018How to\u2019 strip at the bottom of the frame. Death isn\u2019t the only thing we\u2019re being reminded of.<\/p>\n

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Ella Kruglyanskaya, Everyone and Their Mortality<\/em>, 2024; Oil on canvas. 48.3 x 71.1 cm., 19 x 28 in. \u00a9 Ella Kruglyanskaya \/ Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and Bortolami Gallery, New York. Photo: Mark Woods<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Several of the works are dialogues between drawing and painting, another referential twinkle. In Odalisque with Lute and Apples<\/i>, for instance, the nude woman is a hazy scribble of lines in front of neatly painted apples and a lute, as if the complete work were incomplete. But this interplay between painting and drawing is central to Kruglyanskaya\u2019s practice. Throughout her career, Kruglyanskaya has ruminated on the role of the artist and the role of women in particular. In Odalisque,<\/i> the female nude raises questions about the history of women represented purely as objects of male desire, with Kruglyanskaya\u2019s signature wit.<\/p>\n

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Ella Kruglyanskaya, Odalisque with Lute and Apples<\/em>, 2024; Oil on canvas. 167.6 x 157.5 cm., 66 x 62 in. \u00a9 Ella Kruglyanskaya \/ Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and Bortolami Gallery, New York. Photo: Mark Woods<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Plenty of other elements reinforce this self-awareness, such as the painted hole punches at the edge of Roots with Signature<\/i> (featuring root vegetables, not lemons). The edge of Odalisque <\/i>likewise has strips of paint as though accidentally borrowed from the wall on which it hangs.<\/p>\n

But the best examples of Kruglyanskaya\u2019s self-awareness are the exhibition\u2019s titular shadows. In paintings Adventure (in Gray)<\/i> and Shadows<\/i>, Kruglyanskaya paints over her drawings with bold lines of shade, as if the frame were hanging by a nearby window. Indeed, these grey strokes depict the long shadows cast by the light entering Kruglyanskaya\u2019s New York studio. Painting usually depicts light as it falls on subjects; these works depict light as it falls on canvas.<\/p>\n

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Ella Kruglyanskaya, Adventure (in Gray)<\/em>, 2022; Oil on canvas. 96.5 x 86.4 cm., 38 x 34 in. \u00a9 Ella Kruglyanskaya \/ Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and Bortolami Gallery, New York. Photo: Mark Woods<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kruglyanskaya made a name for herself through her bawdy work, with past exhibitions presenting cartoonish faces and bold colors. Here, there\u2019s greater delicacy, if not subtlety, in \u201cShadows.\u201d Many of the canvases explore shadows, but all of them are self-aware. Ignoring even Roots with Signatur<\/i>e\u2014the signature taking up the entire bottom of the painting, in duo-toned curves more attractive than the ostensible subjects of the vegetables\u2014Kruglyanskaya\u2019s presence is unignorable throughout the exhibition. We look at not at drawings but her <\/i>drawings; not at light but her light<\/i>. The bold lines aren\u2019t just shadows. They are Kruglyanskaya\u2019s shadows as she sees them.<\/p>\n

\u201cElla Kruglyanskaya: Shadows<\/b><\/a>\u201d is at Thomas Dane Gallery until May 3, 2025.<\/b><\/p>\n

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Ella Kruglyanskaya, Roots with Signature<\/em>, 2025; Oil on canvas. 50.8 x 71.1 cm., 20 x 28 in. \u00a9 Ella Kruglyanskaya \/ Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery and Bortolami Gallery, New York. Photo: Mark Woods<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\t\t\t\t\"Shadow,<\/p><\/div>\n