The Fleeting Light on Your Folds. Solo Show (Part 2).

The second part of exhibition 'The Fleeting Light on Your Folds' that follows Brompton is based in Voshod gallery in Basel. The exhibition, presented in the window, is based on large watercolor works and white sheets of watercolor paper, deliberately torn in a spontaneous manner. Bursting through the layers of paper, the watercolors reveal our corporeality as a set of surfaces of varying levels of attractiveness. They reflect the experience of living in this or that body as a vessel of catastrophic vulnerability and exposure. Katya uses photographs as the basis for her watercolor works; she intentionally modifies figures and fragments of bodies using collage and computer graphics. The large-scale watercolors are obviously the result of delicate, long and painstaking work. Watercolors can evoke a wide range of emotions in the viewer simultaneously, among them pleasure, attraction, even disgust. Nevertheless, these sets of opposing forces are in a certain balance.

We are taught to see their bodies in parts and to evaluate each part separately: breasts, feet, hips, waistline, neck, eyes, nose, complexion, hair, and so on. Nothing less than perfection will do. Beauty is a phantom. The question is, what sort of phantom — will it give freedom or confinement? To be sure, beauty embodied in the body is a form of power. It is a power that negates itself, for this power is not one that can be chosen freely or renounced without social censure.