Vera Iliatova

Featured frontally here are young women, each caught in a significant, quasi-cinematic pose; flowers in vases, cropping up to intrude on human activity; art books, shoes and fabrics scattered on the floor; statues and ceramic figurines competing for our attention with the models; easels and sketchbooks, as well as a standing oval mirror that may reflect one of the canvases against the walls. Plus the moveable furniture, chairs and tables, where a young woman may sit, or the ladder, platform, and staircase where another may stand, the better to see or be seen. Finally, there is the window-wall in the rear plane, translucent or, when open, giving onto a river and barges...

...In earlier paintings going back more than a decade, young girls were often positioned amid trees or beside ponds and rivers, always implying enigmatic narratives, like film stills. Later works incorporated theatrical, even operatic scenes in nature; these are Iliatova’s fetes champetres that update her idols Watteau and Manet. Later still came a series in which vegetation and particularly flowers overwhelm human dramas and architecture. All the while she has steadily come home...to her studio where all these elements reside and where The Drawing Lesson fully takes place. For she has never been a plein air artist. The flowers are now in vases; the models are deliberately posing; the books, loose pages, clothes from a wardrobe and other props all properly belong to her studio where, outside, barges make their way up the river. It is here in this real space that a fictional “Drawing Lesson” is offered, different each time.

The center of that depicted place, the dead center of each canvas, is devoid of objects, but not of paint. The nearly bare grayish floor, however, requires as much paint as do the brighter things that spread out toward the walls of the studio at the edges of the canvas. Depending on the day’s light, the floor of the painting may tend toward cool blue-gray or warmer taupe. Dull but polychrome, this floor, a stand-in for the artist’s palette, comprises several hues that are mixed there then applied, it seems, as an undercoat that delicately mutes the tones of the entire work.This harmonizes the more distinct tones radiating from the quaint dresses, the cut blooms, and the pages from art books (Matisse’s The Piano Lesson for one). Look at A Trance, Reversal; though organized into three intricate vertical panels, the figures and forms interact as a single imagined place of art-making.

This is the genuine space of all these works, the place where abstractions arise from tangible materials, and where anything that might be represented - the outdoors, or history, or fantasies - must originate. Iliatova has represented such scenes in the past; this time she renders the place of that rendering.

—Dudley Andrew, excerpt from the press release, February 2024

Dudley Andrew is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and of Film Studies at Yale University, New Haven, CT. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has been named Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, Paris, France. His most recent book, just published, is French Cinema: A Very Short Introduction.

Vera Iliatova (b. 1975, St. Petersburg, Russia) received a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University, with further study at the Skowhegan School of Art (2004) and a residency at Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation (2007/2008). In 2018, Iliatova was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting. She has exhibited across the US as well in Italy, Germany, Denmark, and Great Britain. Her recent exhibitions include Catskill Art Space, NY; Lehman College Art Gallery, NY (2023), Fahrenheit Madrid, Spain; Nathalie Karg Gallery, NY (2021), Liberal Arts Roxbury, NY; Monya Rowe Gallery, NY (2020).

In 2023, Iliatova received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant that supported the production of The Drawing Lesson.