Ella Kruglyanskaya

Weaving together the graphic and the painterly, Ella Kruglyanskaya’s work focusses on bawdy sexuality and the often fraught dynamics of social interaction. Although overtly drawing on cinema and advertising of the 1950s and 1960s and the history of European expressionist painting, the artist wears her references lightly, inviting a viewer’s eyes and mind to leap into her compositions. Puppeteers with a Big Face shows two clearly unimpressed protagonists dressed in black holding up a sheet on which a line drawing of a third face appears, executed in the style of a confident sketch. The third face’s severe bob, its glasses and angular features are reminiscent of a stereotype of an art or fashion impresario. Have the puppeteers been roped into an egotistic stunt by their employer? Is there rivalry between them for a promotion? Or maybe they are part of a performance that has gone awry.