Alice and fly agarics (Anton Kuznetsov) – MalovModern.Art Online Museum of Contemporary Art

Anton Kuznetsov

Alice and fly agarics

Various fairy tales series

Russia

2022-2023

Oil on canvas

120x107 cm

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This artwork is currently unavailable for purchase as NFT.


 
 

 

Artist about this artwork

In Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland," everyone sees in it a reflection of themselves, like in a mirror. The book acts as litmus paper, revealing who you are: a pragmatist, a poet, a materialist, or a dreamer. Carroll emphasizes the need to believe in miracles, arguing that without them, life loses its meaning and becomes monotonous and gray.

Read more... There's a hypothesis that the story encodes information about other dimensions, requiring only the deciphering of its code to transcend the laws of time and space. Wonderland is an upside-down world where people and things are not what they seem in the real world. The book is full of riddles, rebuses, charades, and puzzles. "Alice in Wonderland" has been translated into many languages, each translation unique.

For one artist, this was also about translating the book into the new, plastic language of painting, resulting in a free fantasy on the theme of Alice. The image of the mysterious English garden, often divided by brick walls into a sum of gardens, fascinated him, and he chose it as the setting for his action. His Alice peers into garden labyrinths, wandering and meeting various characters. Instead of illustrations, his work offers signs and hints at participants and events: the caterpillar symbolizing the transformation of matter into butterflies, Humpty Dumpty as a golden flying egg or the embryo of the universe, symbolizing creation. The absurd knight transforms into a warrior, recalling the theory of relativity and the words of the Black Queen: "Here, you have to run as fast as you can, just to stay in place! If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast!"

The artist was keen to depict the girl in motion, reflecting the constant movement in the book: violation of physical laws, scaling, deformation, disproportion. Unlike typical children's tales with a clear battle between good and evil, Carroll's Alice enters a realm of absurdity, where the purpose of things and characters' identities are unclear. Alice is not an ordinary child but has her own views on life and personal experiences. The artist's daughter, embodying a modern Alice - curious, somewhat impertinent, and persistent in her desire to pass through doors despite size mismatches - modeled for these paintings. Like Alice, she believes that "few find the way, some don't recognize it when they do, some... don't ever want to," but insists there's always a way out.


 

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