Making the world more fun and a little kinder

Making the world more fun and a little kinder

Kyiv 🇺🇦 artist Alena Krutogolova creates her own special artistic language based on a simplified form, deliberate decorativeness, and an ironic worldview.

In her works, she synthesizes the traditions of Ukrainian folk art and elements of naive art with modern artistic trends, expanding the boundaries of her personal creative space, populating it with amazing colorful characters - pet hedgehogs, dreamy flower cats, wandering sea cows, harvest hens, and spotted owls.



In this cheerful color colony, you want to escape and hide from the difficulties, stresses, and troubles that make up our modern life. But, unfortunately, in our mundane everyday life, we lack that simplicity, joy, and a bit of kind and harmless silliness, which adds new colors to life and opens a fresh angle of view on our surroundings.

The author is trying to change the strict reality of life, trying to retell it with her funny, simplified artistic language, decorating it with curls and rhombuses, roses, and cherries. In other words, she wants to create such a world in which the focus of reality is shifted, and the meaning is turned inside out. In such a world, a rose blooms on the head of a cheerful chicken, a flower meadow is earing on the round sides of a melancholic cow, and the mane of a young and ruddy lion is bristling with flowers, like a florist's storefront.

All the author's artworks are brought together by one common color background, creating a single artistic space - the same terracotta-orange world - where more and more new characters settle in every year. Therefore, individual works are easily combined into one composition and can tell new stories.

In her works, Alena Krutogolova uses a bright decorative palette and makes intense color accents, which helps the paintings become the heart of any interior. In addition, she textures layers to add to her original technique.

The colorful heroes of her paintings declare their position to the viewer: it is difficult to blame the universe for its imperfection when a pretzel, a cup of tea, or a bouquet of daisies is balancing on your head at that moment. Life is joy (every time with inhale, and especially every time we exhale)! And that's why we need to live every moment carefully and attentively, just like small children eat cake, with reverence and lightly holding the plate with their hand, because... you never know :)

Children making cookies

Alena's works resonate with people all over the world and are in private collections in the USA, France, Canada, Norway, North Africa, Australia, and Slovenia. Several paintings are in the Cat Museum "Casa de los Gatos", loret de Mar (Girona), Spain. Her works decorate a music studio and even (oh my god!) a dental office. So, in addition to the aesthetic, we also suspect a slight therapeutic effect of Alena's paintings.

Cat Museum, Spain

Casa de los Gatos, Spain

 According to Alena, an artist's main creative goal is to make the world more fun and a little kinder! Because this is the only thing our world truly needs.


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