Natalya Abalakova, an artist and participant of the TOTART project, has died

The artist Natalya Abalakova died at the age of 83. The messages appeared on her Facebook page on Thursday.

Abalakova is known as a post-conceptualist artist and a participant in the TOTART art project. Its full title is “Research on the Essence of Art applied to Life and Art.” Natalya Abalakova has been working on this project since the late 1970s together with her husband, the poet and artist Anatoly Zhigalov.

Both have participated in numerous exhibitions in Russia and abroad, and have carried out more than 100 actions and performances. They created video performances and multimedia projects, exploring the problems of “artist and power”, “language of power and the language of power” and “gender”, tradition and innovation. They also wrote a number of analytical texts about modern culture and art, the ARTUZEL portal writes.

Natalya Abalakova appeared as a guest in Elena Fanailova’s Radio Svoboda program “Freedom in Clubs”.

Abalakova was born in Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) in 1941. Later she lived in Moscow. She is a philologist by education.

“I do not associate myself with any art school or direction; by developing the TOTART PROJECT, together with Anatoly Zhigalov, we implement what seems to us to be relevant, promising and interesting… I am interested in the pioneers and trailblazers of the “Heavenly Way”, as I metaphorically called her monumental series of triptychs; it is an attempt to formulate the essence of avant-garde art of the 20th century, an important place in which the Russian avant-garde of the 20s occupies. I am closer to the spirit and philosophy of this phenomenon than to its immediate artistic production,” Natalya Abalakova wrote in her autobiography.