Martynchik Walera Artist from Belarus,based in London

It must be difficult for a western viewer used to liberalism, to decades of Pop Art, of artistic eclecticism, to comprehend what it was like to grow up in a totalitarian regime, grey, dangerous and above all simplistic, with the stagnation produced by banal simplification. I grew up in such a regime. My inspiration, my artistic way out of the stultifying attitudes I and others like me encountered was The Glass Bead Game(1943) of Herman Hesse, who too had been explorying a strugle of the spirit against the power of barbarism. His game, you may remember, involved using as many approaches as possible from the past, the cornucopia of cultures. As my own protest against, and escape route from, the apathy bred by malign authority , I developed a style that uses the gamut of artistic styles from the past - glazing, geometry, perspective, portraiture – together with dizzying echoes of chaos and entropy. It dips into the cultural riches of the visual arts, especially painting.
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Walera Martynchik