I create original visual worlds, transforming fabric, texture, colour and detail into fully conceived artistic realities.
Each image is created directly in front of the camera. I develop the composition, drape the materials onto the model, work with colour, make-up and light, and photograph the final creation myself.
But the photograph is only the beginning.
Today, these created images can move beyond photography and onto architecture — transferred onto concrete, cement or walls and transformed into contemporary frescoes.
The photograph becomes part of the space.
The image becomes part of the architecture.
Would you like to make your image eternal — literally?
A portrait that cannot simply be scrolled past.
Let us create it.
The Art of Elena Ivankova
Heike Welzel-Philipp, April 2014
Like fountains erupting in exuberant cascades,
filled with a sumptuous interplay of exquisite fabrics, lace, tulle and gauze, magnificent hats and enchanting clouds of veiling.
The magnificent folds of numerous layers of fabric, intertwined with belts, drape the garments in fantastical forms, giving each creation an air of refinement.
The summer images, composed mainly of delicate white fabrics, are complemented and adorned with straw hats and flowers woven into flowing hair.
All this beauty is expressed through the photographs of the Russian artist Elena Ivankova.
This dazzling diversity of fabrics embodies an authentic and timeless feminine beauty. Her works are less about action than about carefully constructed tableaux.
She enriches her images with touching, almost surreal props: a bird in a cage, a small bouquet of bare branches held in the hands, a room with floral wallpaper, a bed beneath a canopy of delicate mesh, a crocheted rug, a little Teddy bear.
It is a form of surrealism in which the very air seems infused with femininity.
Many of the female figures evoke the image of the Virgin Mary — a bare halo surrounded by a muted, gentle light, emerging from an almost mysterious, mist-filled depth.
One can sense in these works both the atmosphere of Impressionism and that of Surrealism.
In her photographs, Elena Ivankova creates images of peculiar beauty and an ironic, flirtatious nostalgia.
In doing so, she explores a particular form of retrospective engagement with the development of Russian art — one that stands apart from the tendencies of unofficial Soviet art and, for example, from the post-communist St. Petersburg Neo-Academicism.
Moreover, Elena Ivankova's photographs are not photographs of costumes in which female models simply appear wearing dusty old dresses.
She creates her own style — her own fashion.
A distinctive feature of many of her garments is their skilful and dramatic draping, reminiscent of the way clothing was represented in paintings from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
In the theoretical understanding of art proposed by Karl Pawek, Elena Ivankova is much more an artist who creates her own reality than a photographer who merely observes reality.
Most of her garments are created for a fleeting moment — for a single flash, for one particular photograph. She drapes the garments directly onto the models.
The first fitting, sometimes involving a garment held together by a thousand pins, becomes a genuine challenge for both artist and model.
Over a long period of preparation, the artist gathers and assembles the foundation of each image from an extraordinary variety of details, materials and fabrics: hats, scraps of cloth, belts, lace stockings, ribbons, embroidery, stems and branches.
During this creative process, these elements are painted with gouache and attached using sugar water.
Above all, however, colour plays a crucial role in creating the texture of the image. Elena Ivankova has a remarkable ability to work with contrasts while simultaneously finding colour harmony.
The faces of the models become canvases themselves, painted with lipstick, gouache, watercolour and flour.
Light and shadow are then carefully established, and the final stage is the creation of an imaginative hairstyle.
These photographs embody a world of fantasies, dreams, memories and desires — a world in constant pursuit of beauty, drawing upon visual conventions inherited from the past, while at times allowing the contemporary artist to gently mock them.
For all this luxurious and breathtaking beauty is ultimately made from nothing more than scraps of fabric, painted fragments and exquisite drapery — elements that collapse and disappear after the photograph has captured their fleeting existence.
Yet these works do more than delight the eye.
Above all, they become a remarkable comedy of optical illusions.
