Black-and-white world of Beatrix Sunkovsky

Moscow's Stella Art Foundation is presenting a new exhibition. Entitled ‘Distinction and Repetition’, it features paintings and sculptures by Austrian artist Beatrix Sunkovsky.

In the 1970s the Austrian artist was very famous in Europe for her talent in creating picturesque and non-typical theatre sets. But her life-long passion has always been painting.

Her canvases are the combination of geometry and art. Cubes, squares and rectangles merge, shifting to some shapes that remotely resemble architectural forms. But you can only guess what it is, because Beatrix Sunkovsky doesn't name her paintings and prefers other people to think over her works themselves. She says she does not want people to talk about her works. “The only thing I want to do it's to paint them,” she says.

There are only shades of black and white in the world of Sunkovsky, all other colours being excluded. But before the 1980s she did paint in blue and green.

Sunkovsky’s rare talent became internationally renowned, when in the 1980s together with her colleagues she made a revolution in Austrian artistic circles.

“It was Russian constructivism or Russian suprematism and most of Malevich which was their focus to get back to clearer or cleaned, not loaded with emotions language of art,” explains curator Boris Manner.

Two years before the Chernobyl catastrophe she created a piece representing the world going mad, waiting for the time when all nuclear weapons on the planet might explode for some reason.

Apart from painting in oil on canvas, Sunkovsky is also fond of creating bronze sculptures – which are predominantly the images of Death. And yet life – depicted in black and white – remains the main topic of her works.