Self-portrait with a palette

Mediums: oil, canvas.
Location: the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (Russia).

The work illustrates the general tendency for the Russian avant-garde to radically reject cultural legacy and deny continuity. The self-portrait combines destructive and creative principles, the spirit of nihilism, quite aggressive, with creative energy, which is aimed at creating a fundamentally new attitude, primarily towards oneself in anti-normative art. The intensive mastering of new methods helped the artist to depict her inner and outer worlds originally. Half a face, a hand, and a reflection in a mirror, brushes and paints – everything is refracted from several angles and takes on new forms. The author used a restrained gamut of colours, emphasizing thereby that she was interested in forms more than in colour solutions.