Artist's Bio

Natalya Nesterova

1944 - Born in Moscow, April 23, to the family of architects.
1962 - Graduated from the Moscow Arts School.
1968 - Graduated from the Moscow Surikov Art Institute.
1969 - Joined the Artists' Union of the USSR.
1982/86/89 - Won USSR Prize for Best Artwork of the Year.
1990 - Awarded Honors Silver Medal, Russian Academy of Fine Arts.
1991 - Professorship of Painting at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts in Moscow.
1994 - Awarded title "Honored Artist of Russia".
1997 - Elected Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Fine Arts.
1999 - Awarded State Prize of Russia in the Fine Arts.
2001 - Elected full-fledged Academician by the Russian Academy of Fine Arts.
2002 - Awarded the ‘Triumph’ Prize.
2004 - Awarded Honors Gold Medal, Russian Academy of Fine Arts.
In 1969, Nesterova’s method of painting retains some of the directness, the tactile sensibility, the idiosyncratic playfulness, and the sentiment associated with the early Primitivists.
During the seventies, she participated in the Artists’ Union in which she chose to understand her situation more in terms of aesthetics and perhaps in less in relation to politics. While she has persistently followed a direction that ensured a self-directed style and thematic content, in recent years she has focused on the metaphysics of everyday experience.
Her paintings are essentially about this fleeting consciousness, this diurnal frustration to keep time still, to keep the romantic interludes from fading away; her memory of the past is a profound synthesis of both her personal and political experiences.