Kristina Okan

Kristina Okan is visual artist, born in Russia. Currently lives and works in Spain.

In her artistic practice, she examines the fragile beauty of the natural world and visualizes the transformation of life matter. Okan manifests the process of decomposition as the formation of a new aesthetic form by turning withering fruits and vegetables into petrified miniature monuments.

Her porcelain works emerge from the notions of consumption, obsolescence and exploitation. Expressed by fragile decay aesthetics, her works question the idea of “beauty” itself with its obsessive idolization and ephemerality, and therefore refer to the plasticity and emotional expression of Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse. Yet despite these comparisons, Okan’s works differ distinctly from this lineage, primarily thanks to her own relation and view of nature through the prism of personal experience and perception.

After obtaining a Master Degree from the Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts in Moscow, Okan has focused closely on rethinking the matter of time in the vanitas tradition. The stock thesis on the frailty of life, referable in her visual aesthetics, ascends to the tradition of the Dutch still lifes. The artist uses a symbolic system of signification based on the Christian connotation of the ripe fruit as an image of the original sin, ephemerality and death. Nonetheless, her works are not about death, they represent organic metamorphosis, imminence of fading as a novel value.

Okan explores the boundaries between sculpture and drawing. While her porcelain works remain pure white and “bloodless”, her drawings express a rich field of color. The juicy, diffused, willful watercolor drawings coexist in a strong bond with the volume of three-dimensional works. Her drawings are based on the method of graphical punctuation, pointing: each touch to the plane creates volume and gives a tectonic impulse, a launch, an interruption of silence. In her silent artistic experience, she draws parallels with the theories and practices of pioneers of non-objective and abstract art, such as Wassily Kandinsky, who claimed the point as being the only connection between silence and speech, between inaction and action. In this way, she finds her drawing practice drifting in a place where geometrical, physical, and spiritual concepts exist side-by-side.

Okan has exhibited her works in solo and group exhibitions across Europe and Asia, including the UK, Italy, Romania, Greece, Germany, Belgium and China. She has been nominated for the prestigious international ceramic art award Blanc de Chine in 2019 and 2021, and the Koschatzky Art Award in 2021. In 2022, her art work for the Moon Gallery Foundation - the first off-planet gallery, has been launched to the International Space Station as a part of an artistic and scientific mission.

Her works can be found in the following collections: Quanzhou Porcelain Road Art Development Center (Beijing), Rotary Club Wien-Albertina, Cluj Ceramics Biennale.