Dasha Shishkin - Contemporary Artists

Not Sad, Just Sighing

Not Sad, Just Sighing The Saatchi Gallery
 

Dasha Shishkin

Not Sad, Just Sighing

2012
Acrylic and Crayon on Mylar

12 sheets, overall size: 243.8 x 406.4 cm

Survival Takes A Good Memory, another large-scale drawing, highlights the sinuous quality of her lines and their visceral precision truly through the bold colour blocks, like a coloured-in surrealist children’s book or Schiele on acid. Not Sad, Just Sighing depicts another oneiric performance by a familiar high society debutante cast, here even more cartoonised and claustrophobically embedded within a dizzyingly patterned gallery arcade; beyond the Dior gowns and chic pencil skirts, a desert.

Some have seen similarities between her work and the visionary, idiosyncratic action tableaux of outsider artist Henry Darger; her penchant for traditional low-brow art supplies, manneristic repetition and for phallic accessorizing (for starters, take a look at her figures’ noses and nipples) certainly reveal a similar fragility and fantastical obsessiveness.

Text by Lupe Nùñez-Fernández
 
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