Curator Zlata Pavlovskaya told us about Olga Matyukhina, a St. Petersburg artist who develops in different mediums and has a successful experience of creating a fashion collection.
Let’s get acquainted: my name is Zlata, and I am also “in the cult” – I am a curator of contemporary art. Today I would like to tell you about Olya Matyukhina – a successful St. Petersburg artist who managed to find a job using her art and design background. Olya is a graduate of the University of Industrial Technologies and Design in Costume Design. In 2018, she won the “New Names in Fashion” contest from the magazine “Sobaka.ru” with her incredible total pink collection dedicated to men, in which the absurdly pink color became a symbol of protest against gender stereotypes. Later she took part in the Futurum project of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, and her clothing collections were published in Harper’s Bazaar Japan and Teen Vogue USA.
Recently in St. Petersburg one can observe more and more collaborations between clothing brands and contemporary artists, but it is still quite rare to meet an artist whose visual language is actually working with clothing items. The process of creating a costume helps Olga Matyukhina to experience and express her emotions through this special medium (familiar, it would seem, to everyone). In her works, she touches upon themes related to the role of man in society, his memory, and the search for his place and identity in the world.
To overcome the label of “designer” Olga was helped by her first solo exhibition “IVANOVA”, which she presented this August at the Humanist clothing store in the cultural and business space “Sevkabel Port”(creative cluster). The project was dedicated to the time the artist spent with her grandparents in the village. For two years she created textile objects that helped her to rethink and preserve the memories of her loved ones.
In the near future, Olya Matyukhina plans to develop the “IVANOVA” project, as well as to try her hand at working with other mediums, shifting her focus to graphics, painting and digital art. Today I will simply advise you to take a closer look at what she is already doing.
