Gigantic bottles of vodka and dinosaurs in Moscow, little women riding fish in the sea…resting among flowers and fruits – the art of Sasha Vlasova (born 1978) emerges out of an interest in architecture, music, painting and a great deal of literature.

The talented Moscow-based artist loves ancient civilisations, cave paintings – the magical, the mystical and the mysterious. Things that cannot be explained. Many of her dreamy, cute and colourful paintings are created to be deliberately confusing. They defy easy and straightforward logic.

Sasha graduated from the N. Nesterova Academy of Painting in 2002, where she was taught by prominent local artists Vadim Kulakov, Sergey Alimov and Anatoliy Kuznetsov.

She conveys an implicit melancholic message to the viewer: “Look, there’s a secret life of things, of nature and man! The night is alive as in Hoffmann’s stories, spirits whirl before Christmas as in the fiction of Gogol. We have our being on a phantasmagorical plane of existence, full of talking plants, young mermaids, moving buildings and menacing vessels full with laughing gas. The world of old tales and urban legends is our own – free, chaotic, fascinating. The world is not what you see, it has a hidden meaning, love and beauty.”

Sasha likes the painters of the early Renaissance, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Gainsborough, Magritte, Delvaux, Picasso as well as the movements constructivism, classicism, Soviet Neoclassicism and art Deco. Apart from Hoffmann and Gogol, the writers she admires are Pushkin, Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and Nikolay Gumilev. Along with all of these, she is influenced by the art of ancient Egypt, Africa and Russian fairy tales.

Sasha is a member of the Moscow Artists Union – Monumental and Decorative Arts Section – since 2002. She was awarded a Silver Medal from the Russian Academy of Arts in 2013. Her works are in the collection of A. Pushkin State Museum, Pereslavl-Zalessky Historical, Architectural and Art Museum, Kaluga Museum of Fine Arts and in private collections in Russia, Germany and China.

Find Sasha Vlasova on Facebook and Artmajeur.

Thanks to Oksana Tzarevskaya for this post.