In Sudbina’s paintings pieces of frayed reality are artfully combined with areas of pure gestural abstraction, forming her dynamic visual language.
This contrast explores the relationship between actuality and human perception, a physical space and a memory of it. Layer by layer, she builds tactile planes interrupted by calligraphic lines of ink. Through a mastery of surface and composition, Sudbina’s paintings imaginatively balance the language of abstraction with references of contemporary life seen through the prism of her artistic vision.
Born in Moscow in 1984, Anna came of age in the post-Soviet Russia where apart from academic drawing and painting she studied linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.
Sudbina embarks on her artistic practice with three main stages in mind, for the first layer she considers a traditional figurative representation of reality, to set the colour scheme and composition, providing a context which she refers to as the Ego. Occasionally she begins with pure abstraction starting from the gestural base, allowing the canvas to guide her into discovering the composition. The second layer is Sudbina’s Id, an intuitive state of concentration in which her raw, gestural mark making is dictated by her subconscious. The third stage, the SuperEgo, is about finding compositional balance through non-action and negative action, standing back to analyse and then jumping forward to undo, scrape or cover up parts of the painting.
