Skugareva Marina
“Evening Kyiv” is one of Skugareva’s works created in a squat on Furmanny Lane in Moscow. It depicts a nude female figure, which Marina has addressed throughout her artistic practice.
The woman on the canvas is depicted in an unnatural pose, her face is difficult to see, and there are marks on her body that look like wounds: lines on her torso and thighs, stitched as if with cords, calves of her legs, a plastered face, even her hair looks painful.
The work contains elements recognisable to Skuharieva’s work: a background divided by two colours, embroidery elements, an image of a coat of arms in the upper right corner of the canvas, and a title that refers to a Kyiv newspaper. Skuharieva inherited this “journalistic” tradition from her mother, who worked in the media.
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.
