Artwork Description
Scattered Beads
Dimensions: 25 x 23″
Year: 2003
Media: archival pigment print on canvas
In his oil on canvas work, Scattered Beads, Igor Melnikov subverts social perceptions of childhood innocence and femininity by depicting a girl that lacks clearly defined—and sexually charged—identifiers. Instead of embodying the traditional image of a young girl, as one who submits to both the viewers’ and the male gaze, Melnikov’s figure retains a sense of agency through her emotional and gendered ambiguity. Rather than averting her eyes she looks out at her audience, at once haunting and questioning.
Russian born artist, Igor Melnivok, upends traditional associations with portraiture through his haunting and intrinsically psychological paintings of emotionally ambiguous children and within his subtle natural explorations. Rather than focusing on the individual identity of those within his works, Melnikov instead looks to viewers as dynamic participants in the interpretation of his paintings, allowing them to determine whether the children might burst into tears or laughter, based on personal experience, thought, and upbringing. Melnikov is fascinated with the simultaneity of happiness and suffering, which he believes function as an expression of the ‘complexity of the human personality’ and exist as a component of the ‘meaning of being’. Melnikov’s paintings are collage-like, yet not in the traditional, material sense of the process—instead layering his own psychological explorations onto his attempted understandings of the human condition and expression. While his muted color palettes might at first appear to be reductive, they instead focus viewers’ attention on the figures within the work and encourage slow and thorough readings of the detailing that remains visually available. While people and the human condition remain the primary subjects within his paintings, Melnikov also expresses an artistic concern for the natural world, whether expressed in landscape surroundings or in its more material and familiar manifestations, seen in the figure’s clothing and simple possessions.