PLATO

Plato is excited to announce Katya Muromtseva’s first solo exhibition in New York, Heart Left in the Bag, featuring her signature “shadow” watercolor portraits created during interview sessions with female immigrants living in the U.S. and coming from such diverse places as Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, Iran, Romania, Russia, the Philippines, Sweden and Ukraine. The answers to the artist’s key question – “When did you feel that you live in history?” – locate the lives of her interviewees within a larger historical narrative. An extension of this practice – three monumental triptychs, magnifying the stories of individual sitters to mythic proportions, will envelop the gallery’s expansive back space. The artist will be painting additional portraits during live sessions throughout the run of the show.

Katya Muromtseva has always been interested in storytelling and memories as a counterpoint to the official narratives of historical events. Four years after she first started the series to process her own recent immigrant experience, it has blossomed into a sustained, ever-evolving practice that translates deeply personal accounts into poignant imagery and makes apparent the shared humanity of the women who confide in her.