As the year’s warmest blossoming season begins, Art Platz Gallery invites you to feel summer’s presence and immerse yourself in the atmosphere of a flower garden. Jekaterina Ribakova’s solo exhibition Fiore turns to the motif of the flower as one of the most enduring and richly meaningful images in art.
For many centuries, flowers have inspired artists and poets alike, reflecting humanity’s admiration for the beauty of nature and an enduring fascination with the moment of blossoming. Flowers are at once fragile and powerful – carrying a universal language that reaches across time and cultures, expressing emotion and holding quiet, often deeply personal meanings within them. In much the same way, Ribakova perceives the garden in her work as a space of experience, where observation transforms into feeling and association.
The exhibition comprises two complementary parts – watercolours and graphic ink works. In each, the same source of inspiration reveals itself through distinctly different visual expressions: the watercolours are defined by a free, painterly approach with an emphasis on the flow of colour and mood, while the ink drawings are characterised by a more structured hand, where line and rhythm take on particular significance.
The watercolour series depicts flowers rooted in direct observation of nature, with special attention paid to light and chromatic relationships. The works are created using the glazing technique, with colour applied in multiple near-transparent layers that create nuanced depth and rich tonality. What matters here is not only form, but also the impression of a moment – the sense of a flower’s presence, heightened by the lightness and transparency of watercolour.
Ink drawings created in the artist’s unique original technique give the floral motif an entirely different character – moving away from the observation of nature and transforming into compositions shaped by imagination. The works are created using graphite pencil, ink, and dip pen, enriched with decorative and calligraphic elements. In contrast to the lyrical quality of the watercolours, these works are distinguished by precision of line and an interplay of contrasts, while the symbolic and personally significant accents woven throughout open up a broader space for interpretation.
The exhibition invites the viewer to enter this world of flowers as an experience – to observe, to linger, to move gradually from the visible toward feeling, where the flower reveals itself not only as a form in nature, but as a personal encounter.
Works from the exhibition are available for purchase.
