Natalya Zaloznaya (born in Minsk, Belarus): a resident of Brussels, Belgium, since 2000; an artist; an author of paintings and installations.
The daughter of Nikolai Zalozny, Natalya Zaloznaya graduated from the Belarusian State Academy of Arts in 1985. She was mentored by one of Belarus’s most eminent art figures, architect and art historian Oleg Khadyka. In 1997, Zaloznaya completed an internship at KulturKontakt, Vienna, Austria and Kunstlerhaus, Boswil, Switzerland.
Natalya says she has learnt from Picasso, Cézanne, Petrov-Vodkin, Marlene Dumas, and Peter Doig, but confesses to always being especially influenced by Chinese painting. “What I like about it is its black-and-white asceticism, the fact that each painting is as if left unfinished. The black-and-white coloring bespeaks its distinct expressiveness, the incompleteness – its subsequent development,” Zaloznaya says of Chinese painting. We can say exactly the same thing, word for word, about her own works. Zaloznaya’s techniques are in certain ways redolent of ancient Chinese art, while in her work she also employs Chinese ink.
Zaloznaya’s painting is multi-layered, multi-vocal, yet evokes a sense of lightness, buoyancy, semi-transparency. Symbols and letters in her paintings simultaneously become both a message for the viewer and the fabric of the work, and space can get distorted, showing the familiar in a new angle. “The category of time and space is what I’m trying to interpret in my oeuvre,” says Natalya Zaloznaya, who, along with painting, also practices installation art. A participant in the 2005 Venice Biennale, the artist takes part in exhibitions mainly held in European museums and galleries. Natalya Zaloznaya and her husband, artist Igor Tishin, have been living in Brussels, Belgium, since 2000. Her works are featured in the collections at the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia) and the National Art Museum of Belarus (Minsk, Belarus).