A Diary in 2 Parts

2010

Nina Kerzelli graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute in 1986; however,  she has never worked as an architect. Before leaving Russia she was drawing with oil on thin paper and from time to time exhibited in the galleries that just started to appear: now in Regina, now in Kashirka. The technique of producing oil drawings on paper was chosen for a reason:

Their ephemerality (the oil should, in time, destroy the paper) suggested that art works will live and die along with the artist, the thought that artist herself found fascinating. Later Kerzelli has abandoned this idea of  intentional fragility and changed the paper type.

Since her departure in 1994, Kerzelli has lived in Germany, then in New York, until in 2000 she moved to Turkey. This move had an unexpected impact on the artist: red color has burst into her drawings with great force. Somehow it also brought the freedom from ‘’professional’’ limitations: the process of drawing has become primarily emotional, turned into the natural process of living, where there were no witnesses, where the artist was alone with herself and hence it was possible to make mistakes, blot out the unwanted, make the corrections, repeat...

Even though Kerzelli is not a frequent visitor to Moscow, the number of appreciators of her art is steadily growing here, which is not surprising: the combination of genuineness, passion and almost caballistic encoding of hidden meanings makes her art unique and captivating

N. Tamruchi,

Open Gallery

2012