Persten

In 1989, Olga Tobreluts graduated from the Architectural Technical Secondary School. In 1991, she enrolled in a course in computer graphics at the Art Com Institute in Berlin. Since 1993, she has actively worked with video and computer art. In 1995, she received the Russian Presidential Scholarship from the Ministry of Culture of the RSFSR. That same year, she received a prize for a video film with elements of animation entitled "Woe from Wit" at the festival "Third Reality," St Petersburg. Since 1998, she has worked as a curator for many photography exhibitions at the photography center of the club "Mama." Olga Komarova-Tobreluts is a pioneer in animation and computer graphic in St. Petersburg art. For five years, she has actively worked in the area of electronic art. She intentionally uses new media as a means of expressing her own system of poetics. This type of poetics is based on the dialectics of high and low academism: where the artist constantly strikes a balance between high-style classical models and low-brow, kitschy, and crude models.

In this sense, Tobreluts belongs to the neo-academic branch of Petersburg artists. At the same time, she is quite independent and allows herself to go beyond the basic framework drawn by Timur Novikov. The fact is that this movement to use high-style models, and the polemics with the post-modernist paradigm, and the desire to play with that which is aesthetically pleasing, sublime, and classical (inherent in art and in one’s way of life, which is a main component in the work of neo-academic Petersburg artists) only interest Tobreluts to a certain extent. The main area of focus in her art is the idea of representation as such. This idea is incorporated in the visualization of the concept of "trying on for size." Beginning with the series "Empire Reflections" She lets herself (her friends, relatives, contemporaries, strangers, almost impersonal or, on the contrary, mega-idols of the media) to take historically established conceptions of beauty and "try them on for size."

These scenes could be the Arcadia of imperial Rome or the kitschy appeal of a provincial photo studio, or the aggressive imagery of a modern mass cult. The form of the thing of beauty is absolutely unimportant. Only one thing is crucial: to strive to personify beauty. This endeavor requires a sort of magical crystal and Tobreluts creates this magical glass: her computerized backgrounds take over a specific electronic space. They grow into a milieu of light and air or perceptional puzzles and illusions. In a word, they begin to resemble the enticing and deceptive classical "illusions" or the perspective conceits of classical academism, an enchanting picturesqueness. The representation of the concepts of the accessibility of beautiful things, the miraculous power of the beautiful, with quite ambivalent manifestations in Russian art, are reincarnated on a new level in the art of Olga Tobreluts.

Alexander Borovsky

Chief Curator of Contemporary Art, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg

http://www.tobreluts.info/works/WORKS.htm