Women United ART PRIZE 2023
Painting & Drawing Category
finalist

ARTIST BIO

Katya Granova (b.1988) is an artist and curator from St. Petersburg, Russia, who currently lives in London. Her first degree was obtained in social psychology, and after some time, she gradually changed her main focus to her artistic practice. Granova holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2021), a Certificate degree from Paris College of Art (2015), an MA Art and Space Degree from Kingston University London (2013), and finished the ICA Moscow course "New Artistic Strategies" in 2017. Recent exhibitions include "When my Babushka joined the Reich", Barbican Art Group Trust, London (2022), London Grands 2021, Saatchi Gallery, London (2021), and New Painting, Galerie Dutko, Paris (2020). She has held art residencies with the Barbican Art Trust (2022), Sommer Atelier Aschersleben (2022), Dukley Art Residence in Montenegro (2020), Sphera Fund Moscow (2021), and Art Residency Normandy (2020). Granova was shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize 2020 and the Bankley Prize 2019, was a finalist for the Castlegate Art Prize (2020), Art Works Open (2021), and has won the Signature Art Prize 2020 in the painting category. In 2020, she also collaborated with Burberry UK on a commercial project, and in 2021, the Royal College of Art bought the work "Surgeons" for their public permanent collection. In 2020, she also collaborated with Burberry UK on a commercial project, and in 2021, the Royal College of Art bought the work "Surgeons" for their public permanent collection.

Granova is also a current member and a co-founder of the APXIV art collective, which has had many exhibitions over the last 6 years in Moscow, St Petersburg, Budapest, and Copenhagen.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My practice is structured around the experience of the national past, and I employ the medium of painting to access it on a material and personal level. I use found old photographs, which I enlarge and transfer onto canvas, to paint over them, speculatively inserting my presence in the scenes they contain.

This interest stems from my upbringing on the ruins of a defunct empire. I was born in what was still the USSR, which collapsed soon after, and not only as a state but also as a cultural narrative. My family members were sharing completely contradictory stories about the Soviet past merged with propaganda. I witnessed how history textbooks in school were changed and replaced as new, post-Soviet histories emerged. This constantly updated past did not offer much ground for a growing generation, and this sense of disorientation sparked a desire to reclaim at least some bits of objectivity, which one can find in old family photographs—too mundane to be censored.

Recently, I was completely shocked when the full-scale military invasion in Ukraine was justified via speculations on the past, and that made me see even more treasures in those mundane old photographs, unedited by any political power. When I paint over enlarged photographs, my hunger for an objective history fuels my brushwork's expression, but I never try to change the content of a photograph deliberately. I only use black and white photographs; I bring my presence into them through intuitive colour decisions. I often mix the foreground and background into a single pictorial mass —like memories in old age becoming just a mass with some sparkles. The large scale of my works allows me to see them as portals, now just as windows into the past.

London / United Kingdom