Natta Konysheva - A Grotesque Chronicle of a Russian Nonconformist Artist
Updated: Sep 18
Hello, dear Stranger!
Welcome to our blog. Here, we want to explore the lives and works of Soviet and modern Russian painters. Some of them have become well-known abroad, leaving a significant mark on the global art world. Some of them remained relatively unknown - even to the Russian public. Looking beyond their biographies and paintings, this blog will aim to investigate their aspirations, philosophy, values, mindset, and ideals - everything that formed a basis for their personal freedom and artistic expression.
The Soviet period (1922-1991) produced an extraordinary diversity of artistic talents. For some artists, art became a means of engaging with the official cultural order. For others, it became a space of quiet resistance, experimentation, introspection, or complete personal independence. Many followed paths that existed outside the established institutions and conventions of their time.
Modern Russian art remains a world of extraordinary contrasts. Combining tradition and rebellion, conformity and independence, recognition and obscurity, every painting usually contains not only an image, but also a particular way of seeing the world - and, often, a personal struggle to preserve one's own vision and extraordinary personality. At the end, this blog will try to find an answer to the eternal and deeply philosophical question spanning many centuries of human civilization: What does it mean to be an artist? By examining different artistic paths, we will try to reveal something more than the history of individual artists and understand the deeper relationship between art, freedom, identity, cultural environment, and the human desire to create.
The first post in this blog is devoted to one of the notable and unique Soviet and Russian nonconformist artists, Natta Konysheva. Natta was born in 1935 and died in 2022, at the age of 86. Being an active painter through some of the most transformative decades of Russian history, including the collapse of the USSR, Natta's works and artistic worldview offers a fascinating lens on this period. Most of the photos for this post have been extracted from her official page on livejournal, thanks to all contributors and friends.
Natta started her active artistic life in the 1960s, working as an industrial graphic designer for some of the Soviet publishing houses. During her early years, she was largely influenced by some influential figures like Vladimir Favorsky (1886–1964), Ely Belyutin (1925–2012) and his studio ‘New Reality’, and Dmitry Gordeev (1940–2011), who was part of the ‘Twenty Moscow Artists’ group.
It has been estimated that Natta created over 30,000 paintings over her artistic life. She has frequently named her style as "reportage painting with elements of miracles". Being in public, Natta was equipped with a sketchbook and pen - drawing always, everywhere, and everything. One could encounter her at countless art openings, flea markets, city fairs, and festivals - amidst the crowds of people that drew her so strongly. Known for her expressive figures, theatrical compositions, vivid colours, and dreamlike imagery, Konysheva developed a unique, emotionally direct and visually captivating artistic language combining elements of modernism, expressionism, primitivism, surrealism, and folk-inspired imagery.
Natta’s artistic world can be best understood using a metaphor of an unpredictable “vinegret” (a traditional Russian salad known for its mixture of ingredients, flavors and textures). Natta's canvases mix contrasting aspects of life: high and low, large and small, beauty and ugliness, good and bad. The complex ordinary scenes of her paintings are filled with people, objects and everyday situations. Musicians, performers, couples, men and women, families and friends, children, animals, and other physical objects inhabit an imaginative world somewhere between everyday life and the artist's dreams.
Natta's paintings represent a grotesque chronicle of urban life. Her works capture the diversity, absurdity, and vitality of the modern city in different settings. Communal apartments, bars, cafés, artistic gatherings, vernissages, and street scenes - rather than presenting these subjects in a purely realistic manner, she transforms ordinary experiences through her imagination and humour. In the book "Le Galeriste" (2016), Bernard Vidal called Nata as "the caricaturist of a grotesque world, of ordinary human life". He also stated that "her gaze is filled with tenderness - for the little girl struggling on her trapeze, for the worn bodies of women in Moscow’s bathhouses, and for the ordinary crowds having a difficult life and no longer expecting anything from it except a miracle". Her art works are full of irony and open sarcasm, but they are not driven by hostility or bitterness. Instead, they reveal an observant and playful attitude toward the contradictions of everyday existence.
A significant body of Natta Konysheva’s paintings from the 1980s and 1990s was devoted to her close friend and fellow artist, Viktor Krotov. A romantic surrealist painter, Krotov maintained a long-standing friendship with Natta, and the two artists shared neighbouring studios on Serebryanichesky Lane in Moscow. Their proximity fostered a creative dialogue that found its way into Natta’s work, where Krotov appears not simply as a friend, but as a recurring figure within her intimate artistic world.
Natta’s studio on Serebryanichesky Lane, in the heart of Moscow, became the centre of her artistic universe. For much of her life, she lived and worked in an old merchant’s mansion - a remarkable two-storey building comprising 15 rooms. Over the years, every corner was transformed by her presence. Paintings, tapestries, toys, and art objects gathered from flea markets and travels around the world filled the rooms, turning the house into an immersive extension of Natta’s imagination and creative life. During the Soviet era, the mansion was also a gathering place for many avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and members of Moscow’s bohemian circles. Above this almost dreamlike environment, Natta painted to the constant accompaniment of classical music. Her creative world was inseparable from the physical world of this old house: she was as likely to be found cutting hardboard and assembling frames as reinforcing walls and ceilings or repairing leaking pipes, sealing them with plasticine and paint.
Boundless, inexhaustible energy was fundamental to Natta’s character. Petite and slender in appearance, she possessed an extraordinary inner strength and an uncompromising sense of freedom and independence. Yet this fierce autonomy was accompanied by profound sincerity, vulnerability, modesty, and humility in her own perception of herself. "Yes, I’m common as everybody, nothing special, I’m digging up. Workaholic. More carpenter than a painter" - she once said. Natta remained remarkably detached from the conventions and hierarchies of the art world, largely indifferent to recognition, status, or fashionable approval. She pursued her work on her own terms, allowing her artistic vision to evolve according to its own internal logic rather than external expectations. Natta possessed the unique gift of seeing things "as they are" - she never flattered her subjects, but instead perceptively “scanned” them, bringing to the surface a person’s essential traits and their inner self.
Natta had a little interest in idealising life or hiding its imperfections. Her paintings pulse with a poignant awareness of both the beauty and the inevitable fragility of existence. Her distinctive caricatural artistic language, combining social irony, philosophical reflection, and an irrepressible sense of humour, is unmistakable and unique. Natta's paintings function as atmospheric and intricately observed chronicles of their time. The circle of her admirers is constantly growing and her works can be found in many Moscow and international collections, including the State Russian Museum and the State Tretyakov Gallery.
Some of Natta's paintings are currently available in our store.
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