Andjana Pachkova - From Light to Dark

Andjana Pachkova: From Light to Dark 8 March - 1 April 2023  Free Artists Talk Saturday 25 March 3.30pm

Landscape painting has long traditions in the pictorial depiction of nature; the shadow of light; trees in a meadow; criss-crossing waterways. However, you won’t find a realistic render of landscape in Pachkova’s latest body of work. It is not the contours of the land, nor the colours or textures that interest the artist but rather the way a sense of place permeates the heart. For Andjana, “Landscape is a repository of memory. Travel through landscape allows us literally to get from place to place and also from a moment in time to another moment in time”. Born in Ukraine, Andjana comes from a traditional Russian art tutoring background. 

“My newest works reflect my love affair with the Ocean. We move from the Sunlight Zone where the light penetrates. The show is roughly divided into the oceanic layers or zones: it starts with the Sunlight, then it goes into the Twilight, then Midnight and then the depths of the Abyss and Trenches. I saw it in a simple way of the transition from light to dark but then on a metaphorical level of when you engage deeper into the unconscious. I see the oceanic trenches as a place of depth and replenishment. In the fathomless depths there is bioluminescence, even in the deepest darkness a source of light.” —Andjana Pachkova