"Kind-hearted strawberry grins"

The exhibition "Kind—hearted Strawberry Grins" is a gallery version of the Harvest project, commissioned by the Peace Square Museum Center in 2023. Together with curator Oksana Budulak, the artist mastered the monstrous colossus of the last Lenin Museum in Krasnoyarsk (1987), where since 1995 the "Peace Square" has been located — the largest outpost of contemporary art in the region. The total installation, which occupied 600 square meters, included graphics, paintings, objects, videos, sculptures and performances. The Moscow version includes mostly pictorial graphics — a key medium Anastasia Rybakova. This self—designation, on the one hand, emphasizes the forced nature of the material available to a young artist: pencils are less markable than paints and do not require a spacious workshop, and on the other hand, describes the method. Rybakova uses her pencil stroke loosely, mixing colors in abundant intersections to create a surface vibrating with hundreds of shades. Starting with postcards in 2020, in a few years the artist has mastered a large format, and now her graphics can work both as a large easel form and as a large-scale installation. The choice of pencil emphasizes another property of her method: to look at the world as a kid. He is inquisitive, greedily snatches out fragments and changes angles, and sometimes is predatory and ruthless in his curiosity. Hence the unconditional attention to detail and descriptive names right on the sheets. At the same time , there is a teenage lostness in these works: the aesthetics of horror manga prevail here over the cuteness of children's animation. Animated vegetables and fruits are equipped with faces, but their facial expressions are ominous and piercing. And the plots themselves are not at all childish — such as promising, but ultimately treacherous love. Such child-adolescent optics allows the artist to indirectly interact with life and art. In this playful world, you can work out your own feelings or invite the viewer to awareness in a less painful way. Indignation, horror, or disagreement with various ethical or hierarchical systems in her works are lived as if casually, hidden behind the stories of vegetables and fruits. This exhibition can also be considered as a new stage in the artist's life, she matures and grows stronger. The key to the exhibition in the scene/szena is the image of paradise, where the spicy shades of the jungle refer to the frescoes of Benozzo Gozzoli or colorful Turkish fabrics. In Moscow, against the background of blooming bushes, Eva becomes more noticeable, instead of shyness or confusion, she shows remarkable skill and excitement on the way to satisfying her curiosity. So is Anastasia Rybakova, hardworking opening project after project in Moscow and other cities, she is moving towards finding his new language and testing its strength.