ASYA FEOKTISTOVA
contemporary artist
Current Project
RELIQUES
This exhibition is about that lifebuoy given to every person in childhood—simple discoveries that, in their scale, are comparable to victories, the birth of children, and death.
Relics of a pioneer. The anchors of life. Encrypted laws. Treasures disguised as the ordinary.
I’m not a fetishist or a pagan. Apparently, I have some Chinese ancestry—only they could condense vast concepts into a single character. Or perhaps I’m a painter: in the sweep of a brushstroke, there is life from birth to death.
At the heart of this project lie relics—memory-forming objects that encompass the scale of one human life. Their meaning is subjective and, for now, known only to me.
@RATTLE (child’s toy) — the first slide in my memory.
Beaded, perfectly shaped like the sun, amber and ultramarine with white accents.
Damaged by me. As a child, I was obsessed with discovering what was inside.
@SAP FUNNEL (rusted, used for collecting resin)
Found in the taiga near Raznezhye. These funnels were nailed to pine trees, which were cut with “herringbone” incisions so the resin would drip and congeal into large amber-like flows.
This forest amber seemed inexhaustible—funnels would overflow, and the tree would keep giving its golden sap.
@WOODEN CROSS (made by nature)
A branch broken by the wind, forming an unmistakable cross you can’t just step over. Such crosses lie across forest paths and enter your field of vision when your thoughts grow serious. Then the cross appears like an answer or a reminder—and it becomes a dialogue.
These three objects are enough to divide my memory into three stages and three ages.
Taking them with me on a long journey, I carry my whole story. These relics embody my philosophy of the origin of meaning and my connection to the world around me. They fill any narrative with depth.
Touching these tangible, meaningful objects is like making a vow: this is honest! I am here and now!
ARTIST STATEMENT
The painting of Asya Feoktistova is shaped by a clear vision of a completed statement and relies
on processuality as a key vector of her practice. Composition emerges in a mode of self-development, where the interaction of transparent and impasto layers serves as a medium for explicating the category of time: its slowing, elongation, and experiencing as an additional resource. This process becomes the primary way of communicating with the surrounding world, which is essential to vibrant, life-sustaining activity.
The artist constructs visual, immersive environments that can be characterized as inclusive spaces of immersion, where the specific viewer does not merely “look” at the work but inhabits it.
Her projects, from “House of Kamenskys” to “As Long as There Is Light” and “Escapes, » function within the paradigm of site-specificity, transcending the conventionality of the painting format. Each series is structured as a dialogue with the architecture and history of the place, where the artwork becomes not an object, but a tool for representing memory, trauma, and overcoming.
For Asya Feoktistova, painting is simultaneously an addiction and hard work, a solution to impossible tasks (tight deadlines, enormous spaces), but it is precisely through this strain and sacrifice that she actualizes the sense of achievement and the role of the artist as a conduit of meanings, rather than an autonomous creator. In her practice, each unit of surface carries significance, and the final artistic form presents itself as a parallel world, offering the viewer the experience of authentic presence and an encounter with light.
RECENT PROJECTS
Connections
Pakgauzy. NGHM.
Nizhny Novgorod
Curator: Irina Gorlova
As long as there is Light
FUTURO Gallery.
Nizhny Novgorod, 2025
Fragile Transformations,
Decisively Changing
the Meaning
of What Is Happening
GRIDCHINHALL. Moscow,
2022
Curator Irina Gorlova
Shoots
Marina Gisich Gallery. 2024
Saint Petersburg
Curator: Gleb Ershov
GALLERY OF ARTWORKS
Here, I present the most vivid and beloved projects out of the sixty I’ve realized.
I am always searching for a PLACE.
Artistic growth means new spaces that can embrace my painting.
My projects are site-specific. A new opportunity to engage with a space immediately sparks ideas—scale, mood, intention.
I see how color can transform a space, change its nature.Often, my works are united in series, and the meaning unfolds as the narrative develops. But each one of them meets my internal standard of painterly quality. Painting lives, birthing itself anew—the plot is not important. What matters is the impulse, the movement, the artist’s real experience. The subject is just a pretext for diving into this element.Each work is essentially a self-portrait, teetering on the edge of reality and its interpretation through form and image.
I, Asya Feoktistova, am a painter.
I am fascinated by all expressions of life—both material and spiritual.
From the movement of neurons to the global existence of matter,
the emergence of thought, dreams, the unfurling of tree buds and their roots,
all of history, and the warmth of those close to me.A subject or idea can exist as a color expression, just like it can in mathematical or musical form.
I simply translate what is happening into the language of painting—always dissatisfied with the quality of the translation.In the series:
“Water Level”,
“Enter My Garden”,
“Dreams of China”,
“The Birth of Matter”,
what matters most to me is the subjectivity of the moment, personal connection, and exploration.
God speaks to everyone. Understanding depends on the level of “noise.”
The hardest work happens in the mind.
The act of painting is swift, preserving the first strike on the canvas.
If I manage to seal the motion of thought—or of the wind—then finishing the work becomes a mere technical task.The canvases are traps I set in the Studio.