Skugareva Marina
“Moscow News is one of Skugareva’s first paintings, created in a squat on Furmanny Lane in Moscow. The image of a woman who has turned away from the viewer, and the nude female nature in general, would appear in the artist’s work throughout her career.
In this work, Skuharieva depicted a woman from the back. Her body is painted with bizarre ornaments that create the impression of a pictorial tattoo. The background of the painting is divided into two identical vertical coloured stripes – grey and red. They symbolise the duality of the world (the inner world of man and his environment), a motif that can be traced in many of the artist’s works.
Another recognisable feature in Skuharieva’s work is an embroidered element – in this work, it is a flower in the upper right corner, which resembles the image of a coat of arms in a classic ceremonial portrait.
The heroine of this painting was Marina’s artist and friend Yana Bystrova, who was going through a separation from her lover and lived mostly in Kyiv. Skugareva called the news that Bystrova received from her husband in Moscow “Moscow news”. The title of the work also refers to the popular Soviet-era newspaper Moscow News.
She was born in 1962 in Kyiv.
In 1974, Marina entered Kyiv Republican Art School. In 1981 she graduated from the Dzhemal Dagestan art school.
From 1982–1988, she studied at the Lviv State Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts (Department of the Art Textiles).
In 1988, she married the painter Oleh Tistol and left for Moscow with him and painters Konstantin Reunov and Yana Bystrova. There they lived and worked in the squat “Furmanny Lane”, and later in ‘Trehprudny Lane”, where the famous “Gallery at Trehprudny Lane” was situated, founded by Konstantin Reunov and Avdey Ter-Oganyan.
In May 1992, Marina Skugareva and Oleh Tistol received grants from the Christoph Merian Stiftung fund within the cultural exchange program and left for Basel, where they lived until 1993.
In Switzerland they participated in several exhibitions with Gia Japaridze and André Clément. The Swiss artists Suzette Beck, Ronald Wüthrich, and Ilse Ermen became good friends of Marina and later even the heroes of her paintings.
Since 1993 Marina Skugareva has lived and worked in Kyiv.
