She paints what has always been painted -- landscapes, still-lifes, interiors and bare life. Material, recognisable life. She paints in oils and watercolours, uninterested in installations, objects, assemblages and everything else now regarded as "topical" or "relevant".
Art always had, always has and always will have eternal themes and motifs. The desire to depict these themes and motifs in lifelike forms does not abate. Art, however, begins where there is personal intonation, an original style and artisticism tinged by individuality.
In the modern artistic world, fortunately, there is a place for everything -- classical attempts to show reality "as it is" and bold experiments alike. Paradoxically, it is sometimes harder for the artist in the space of traditional painting. Simplicity and clarity often require much greater input than provocative artistic gestures.
To be oneself -- what could be more desirable for an artist and what path is strewn with more difficulties? Particularly when that path was begun late by an artist who owes everything she has to herself alone.
After studying at Polytechnic Institute and working for several years as an engineer, Natalia Rosenbaum sharply changed the course of her life by deciding to become an artist. This was a step fraught with risks, especially today, when professionalism is so often replaced by a trenchant device or the ability to gratify the public or calculating gallery owner. Fate, an inner requirement, taste and talent -- or, more likely, a combination of all these factors -- led Natalia Rosenbaum to become a professional artist.
A grown woman without a long professional career, Natalia Rosenbaum has not only already succeeded in completely assimilating artistic mastery. She has also found her own plastic and colour intonations. And how difficult this is! To look independently at a world shrouded in a virtually transparent mist of metaphors, phrases and plastic interpretations familiar from childhood. To paint an orchard in autumn or a naked body. To be or become oneself. To realise, in the words of Paul Cezanne, one's own sensations.
Both mastery and school are crucial here. Although Natalia Rosenbaum learnt much from Victor Korobeinikov, who studied under Andrei Mylnikov at the Academy of Arts, she has managed to create her own school. Work in art studios, albeit with talented mentors, is not enough. Respect for traditions and the courage to avoid being a slave to these same traditions are also required. The artist's freedom is restrained by her taste and an unprecedented level of mastery, bearing in mind her short professional career. Rosenbaum employs the most diverse media with enviable ease -- oil, watercolours, pastels, gouache, charcoal, sauce and audacious mixtures of other materials -- producing piquant and unexpected results refreshingly free of superfluity.
Such watercolours as With a Doll and Peonies verge on Minimalism. The artist's energetically and densely painted oil canvases have rich and complex textures, regulated light-aerial effects and steady architectonics that appear to dissolve in the painterly "dough" (Masha and Masha and Kent).
The brushstrokes in Natalia Rosenbaum's oil paintings are textural, without being thick. Applied easily, with a sharp mind, they freely "cross over" into the energetic, festive and invariably restrained colour. Special talent is required in order to paint banal motifs with such plastic accuracy and colourist tact, confining the viewer to the strictly outlined space of good taste.
Natalia Rosenbaum does not aspire towards "Robinsonada" or to solely inhabit the space of tradition. She also tries her hand at what it is now fashionable to call "projects" -- conceptual artistic programmes in which several works of art form an intellectual structure, combining painting and a system of ideas. Rat-Catchers -- Institute of Mentors does not lack anything in terms of mental poignancy or artistic ability. This particular project is based on associative thinking, a synthesis of image and programme and, most importantly, outstanding painting -- without which no project is worth its salt.
No ordinary path awaits Natalia Rosenbaum. The artist has a remarkable feeling for the enormous space of the unknown; her aspirations are intrepid and diverse. She also possesses individuality, exact taste and the ability to see the enigmatic side of the world -- all that which, in the words of Russian poet Nikolai Gumilyov, "has still not been fully revealed."
Everything is only just beginning in the art of Natalia Rosenbaum.
Professor Mikhail German
Member of the Liberal Arts Academy,
Member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA),
Senior curator of contemporary art, State Russian Museum,
St Petersburg
russian