A Homage to Life in Our Time
Ekaterina Moré and her prismatic paintings (from 2004)
Since 1995, Ekaterina Moré has been living in Rhineland with her husband and young daughter. She comes from a Russian artist family and was born in St. Petersburg. She grew up in the Russian Far East, on the Kamchatka Peninsula and in Vladivostok.
She had just reached her teenage years when, in 1990, she returned to her birthplace with her parents to complete her schooling there. However, Ekaterina Moré still dreams of the nature of the subarctic zones of the vast country today. The intense colors that characterize the atmosphere of these remote areas fuel her imagination. As she recounted during a conversation in her studio in Neuss, full of beautiful images, the soils there are volcanically black, like in Tenerife, and the short summers are very sunny.
Despite her sensitivity to nature, Ekaterina Moré has not dedicated her work to landscapes but to people – more precisely, to women in the modern world. Her paintings radiate optimism and joie de vivre, and thus positive energies, because they can be seen as symbolic images for a successful identification with the multifaceted manifestations of modern life. Ekaterina Moré's work thus illuminates her very personal relationship to these manifestations, as the self-reference is unmistakable in the appearance of the slender, long-haired female figures that repeatedly appear in her paintings. This self-reference remains, by the way, despite the strong typification of the figures. Role models for such stylizations can be found, above all, in Tamara de Lempicka. And Ekaterina Moré's work also conveys warmth. She clearly distinguishes herself from the cool eroticism of a Lempicka: her paintings are not intended to be explicitly erotic, but sensual. It is often the case in everyday life: it's all about a positive emotional perspective. According to the artist, the positive content should convey the message: enjoy life – life is too short for negative thoughts!
Ekaterina Moré was still a student when she visited the famous collections in St. Petersburg, then still called Leningrad, and discovered many inspirations for her own artistic work there. Besides the examples from the Post-Impressionist era, she also absorbed impulses from Western Pop Art, which was in vogue in Russia in the 90s. The optimistic colors and the abstractions that verge on comic-like abstraction are fully realized in her current works. In her first works, however, she still had a penchant for Wassily Kandinsky's landscape painting. Later, she found her way to abstraction through this path, but soon abandoned it in favor of the human figure. She needs the figure because only then can she bring emotional warmth into the painting, directly to the viewer.
This emotional warmth is conveyed not only through the depicted scenes or figures themselves, but also through the compositions and vibrant colors that act like a prism. This mosaic-like resolution of the image surfaces gives the artist's works a prismatic character. Figure and space merge into a decorative unity. Historically, "Cloisonné" stands for a Symbolist direction that developed out of Post-Impressionism. Paul Gauguin, of whom there are several important masterpieces in the St. Petersburg Hermitage, is considered a pioneer of "Cloisonné" in painting.
There is ample direct connection between Ekaterina Moré's contemporary painting and this historical model. As mentioned earlier, these are primarily images that come from within her and are translated into painting in a very appealing way.
Ekaterina Moré's painting directly and emotionally appeals to people, which is certainly one of the reasons why her works have spread from the domestic public to collections in many countries around the world.
