Katya Granova

My practice centres on exploring the existential experience of the past, using painting as a medium to access it on a material level. I often work with found old photographs or my personal family archive, which I enlarge and transfer onto canvas, painting over them in a speculative manner that incorporates my presence into those inaccessible moments. My approach extends to art from past eras, and snapshots of my present life, all serving as conduits to probe the elusive interstices of history, temporal perception, and the vestiges of what remains obscured.

I've always been fascinated by old, mundane photos of typical family life. This interest stems from my upbringing on the ruins of a defunct empire — I was born in the USSR, which collapsed shortly after, not just as a state but as a cultural narrative. In my family, completely contradictory stories about the Soviet past coexisted. I watched as history textbooks in schools were repeatedly rewritten with new versions of history. This constantly shifting narrative creates a sense of disorientation, a feeling of zero gravity. It sparked my desire to reclaim some semblance of objectivity — something I found in old family photo archives (too mundane to be censored). 

Painting, for me, is a very physical and material experience. My emotional response to the photograph’s content guides my painting. The large scale of my work allows me to be very gestural, bringing the process close to a dance. I use drips, expressive marks, and oil stick doodles to interact with a scene, engage and feel it through my bodily response. I see my whole process of painting over old, mundane photographs as an alchemy, challenging the life-death dichotomy and the linear scale of time. By infusing my energetic presence into a dead moment of the past, I create a transformation that, for me as an artist, is only possible through painting. 

I only use black and white or sepia photographs and bring my presence through intuitive colour decisions. I also seek to disrupt the linear spatial perspective of the photograph, so I mix the foreground and background into a single pictorial mass of slimy paint - like memories in old age become just a mass with some sparkles. But I never try to change the content of a photograph deliberately — I oppose my playful approach to an ideological use of the past.

UK