Looking at minimalistic art can easily lead the unsophisticated observer to believe, “Wow, that artist is lazy” or “Anyone can do that, so why is that good?”
But minimalistic art is about the abstraction of interpretation. It’s about the idea that art should have its own reality and not be an imitation of anything. It is characterized by simple shapes and minimal basic colors. Here, no attempt is made to represent an outside reality.
In the famous words of iconic minimalist artist Frank Stella, “What you see is what you see.”
In Nadiia Forkosh’s work, Nadiia addresses the complex subject matter of consciousness and its various dimensions through a seemingly ironic minimalistic approach. But upon a closer look, the minimalistic style is perfect for conveying the various dimensions of consciousness and their complexities.
Nadiia’s art provides just enough detail to explain how we interpret reality through the various filters of our consciousness.
In an attempt to keep this short and not go into a thoroughly detailed explanation, we can see that her artworks represent their respective titles which comprise the filters of reality or the dimensions of consciousness through which we perceive reality. With a few shapes, lines, and colors, her artwork presents us with these filters while giving space for contemplation.
Here is what Nadiia Forkosh has to say regarding her work:
My painting is closely related to thinking about the history of painting and its purpose. As an example, I try to understand what is cave painting? Is it an attempt to depict oneself or to immortalize oneself? Or why, in ancient Egypt, were depictions of humans done without perspective? Further, why did myth and religion play such an important role in the formation of Renaissance painting?
Questions like these, in one way or another, lead me to the question of what is depicted at all and what is its meaning. What is at the core of painting? Beauty and harmony? Or is it perhaps truth?
All of these seemingly abstract questions will, in one way or another, directly define what I paint and why I paint this way and not that way. Modern painting has freed itself from the figure, from the pressures of outer reality, but what remains? What are we painting now? Emotions, intuitions, the subjective and the accidental?
Nonetheless, the well-known question arises: is all this art?
After all, art is, among other things, a path to perfection, which means that it requires meaningful and consistent work to bring it to life. It seems to me that contemporary art needs to find a new border between subjective impressions and objective reality.
In my paintings, the following is important: to reveal and show the original code of human existence and coexistence.
I try to find invariants in which, from color and form, one can “read” the means of human existence, be it joy or anger, longing or anxiety, mental illness or insomnia, confrontation or conflict, etc. It should be understood that, phenomenologically, our experiences of the world are not merely internal experiences of the subject, not merely reflections of the inner world of man, but that they are constitutive of the very tissue of the reality of that World.
