Olga Osipova. Tea Party with Flamingos

Inspired by the works of Lewis Carroll, Olga Osipova’s paintings can ring the right note even with an untrained viewer. Revisiting Alice’s adventures known to everyone since childhood, the artist ‘compiles’ her female protagonist out of dozens of already existing visuals. That is why her artworks are so dense with the attributes of Carroll’s world eagerly appropriated by popular culture: clocks with hour hands frozen at five, flamingos, giant chess, decks of cards, and tea cup towers. Osipova’s pictures, however, are not mere illustrations to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Just like in nonsense literature, everything is mixed up here: references to works by the old masters from Leonardo da Vinci to Alfons Mucha are found next to philosophic and literary allusions.

The artist strives to imbue her surrealistic paintings with the kind of absurdity inherent in Carroll’s writings: the Cheshire Cat suddenly turns into its Schrödinger’s counterpart, a traditional English tea party requires a Russian samovar, while the pensive Alice whose watch has apparently been showing the same time for countless hours is looking for the answer to the timeless Shakespearean question: to be or not to be. Each of Olga Osipova’s creations is a visual puzzle that can be solved if you follow the flamingos.