Agora Gallery Review:

From cityscapes to still lifes, cafe scenes to portraits, artist, Tatyana,(Ta) Barbanakova creates paintings that affectionately and with an element of nostalgic charm portray glimpses of everyday life. In an impressionistic dappling of blue shadows, rose-colored light, and soft hues of green and yellow, Tatyana paints scenes that are more whimsical and dreamy than realistic, like vignettes from a classic tale recounted generation to generation. The seasons, the weather, and the passing of time throughout a day have a subtle but poignant influence on Tanya's works - while difficult to place in a specific era in time, her paintings revolve around the first snow of winter or the park in summertime, the breakfast table or afternoon light on a windowsill arrangement. Born in Krasnodar, Russia, Tatyana studied at Kuban State University in the Department of Drawing and Graphics. She has participated in exhibitions throughout Russia and Europe.

ArtisSpectrum Review:

Ta Barbanakova crafts gentle, impressionist works of poignant beauty. Her dash and pointillist technique fashions tableaus rich in emotion and expressive pictorial structure. In subtle poetic forms of light and space, in natural tones and with unique rhythms of composition, her works are reflections of intimate, delicate interactions between material and spiritual forces in the living world.

It is instructive to consider Barbanakova's vibrant work through the prism of Impressionists Pissarro-with his dash and pointillist technique-and the soft landscapes of Monet. Still life paintings featuring landscapes of tree lined paths, birds perched upon night lamps, fashionably dressed women strolling about with pet dogs, and park benches graced with napping cats, pepper her works. Ta draws inspiration from aspects of both physical and unseen worlds. Simple things that surrounds us in our daily lives-a window, a street light, a house-and things that affect us on a deeper, spiritual level-thoughts of happiness and sadness, friendship and loneliness-all provide inspiration that is reflected in Ta's paintings. In Postal Official, a mysterious, frightening postal worker stands beneath a hanging street clock, trees and an urban cityscape behind him, a cat on a fence wary of this dark individual. Barbanakova suggests an isolation felt in cities where individuals toil in their work but often feel alienated. The cities are built from buildings stacked on top of one another vertically, in a manner suggesting factory assemblage, both the beauty and inevitability of social structures. They are akin to Klee's towns of distinct, geometrical stacked homes, of interest not because of their pragmatic visual beauty, but for metaphysical architectural attributes, pictorial orderliness and metaphysics.

There is a pictorial clarity and excellent composition in First Snow, a beautiful, wonderfully semi-abstract tableau of snow filled trees, paths, and a barely viewed road-bound school bus, all arranged in a succinct, powerful composition of mercurial elegance. Interweaving these physical and unseen worlds, their internal and external forces, drives and inspires Ta's work. Breakfast, though on the surface a quiet, unassuming still life, brims with life, drama, and narrative innuendo. An outdoor breakfast table composed with soft pastels of blue, green, and pink, is reminiscent of the mature cubist work of Georges Braque, though the use of color and light is distinctively Impressionistic. The table, set charmingly with green apples, croissant, and cup of coffee, awaits a diner who will breakfast alone. A flower placed in a cup of water is a sincere effort by someone-a servant, lover, the diner themselves-to make quaint and pleasant this outdoor dining session. And yet, mysteriously, the diner has yet to appear to enjoy it, the coffee growing cold. "My paintings are my thoughts, my childhood memories that are calling me back, new experiences and my dreams that drive me forward." Barbanakova says. Her paintings are dialogs between the artist and her thoughts, her experiences, visions and memories. The beautiful harmonies of nature, splashes from the fountain, a sudden gust of wind, branches of the tree, or snow flakes in suspended animation are all reflected in her paintings with balanced forms and color relationships.

Born in the city of Krasnodar, Russia, Barbanakova received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Kuban State University in her hometown. Her work betrays the temperance of small Russian towns, sharing the tableaus of fellow Russian Chagall-color drenched, small towns rich in folklore and regional beauty. Many of Ta's works are located in private collections throughout Russia, Europe and the U.S., and she has exhibited extensively at galleries in St. Petersburg and Berlin. The stunning beauty of these colorist diaries of nature in all its splendor and varying moods-drag ugliness as well as beauty-are powerful and edifying. Man and animal, caught in attempts at finding a place in nature's embrace, is a recurring theme that speaks to the yin and yang of the inanimate and living, the breathing, and that in nature still. Barbanakova's ability to frame and juxtapose these cohabitants of the planet presents instances of worldly beauty and a mystical reckoning of our place within it. A view outside a window, across a sill and onto a city, becomes a multilayered, emotional vision of personal longing and societal relations. The mystical Rara Avis (meaning loosely a "rare, unique thing") gives us a dove framed in a rectangular box of compositional sophistication, alone in nature, going about its business and yet hyper-aware of its place not only in nature but in the painting itself, staring out at the viewer, questioning its role in the cosmos, and our relationship to it.