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. 

 

To make a portrait, the artist projects a large shadow of her subject on paper mounted on a wall, traces it and fills it in with watercolor, a fluid, unruly medium that takes hours to set and dry and calls for a balance between control and trust in the material. As in a gigantic lava lamp, the tones and colors within the portraits exist in a mesmerizing liquid flux. The medium and its use echo the constant adaptation, mimicry and identity shifts associated with living in a foreign country; as well as a balance between personal agency and trust in fate when navigating the circumstances beyond our control.

 

One such balancing act led Muromtseva to discover her strongest suit – a remarkable sense of color – after years of prior work predominantly in monochrome. Asked about how she decides which interviews will turn into monumental triptychs, the artist credits serendipitous encounters and intuition: “it’s as if they choose me… Some conversations linger long after they’re over, reverberating in my mind and taking on a life of their own. They manifest as vivid, almost cinematic impressions—snapshots, emotions, and sensory echoes that compel me to respond visually.”

 

The results are vertiginous, lush compositions featuring human bodies fused or connected with those of animals and other abstract and figurative shapes in a loosely elliptical interflow. The triptychs’ monumentality, archetypal imagery and frieze-like composition evoke precedents from ancient cultures throughout the world, such as Greek and Roman frescoes, Maya murals, totemic sculptures and even cave paintings. Individual stories of three former or current nurses – Angie from the Philippines, Leyla from Azerbaijan and Hengameh from Iran, take on heroic dimensions, united by the themes of suffering, perseverance and care. 

 

Leyla has worked with violent patients and did not abandon her hospital post in the darkest and most dangerous hours of the COVID-19 pandemic; Angie has bonded with her cancer patients and even visited their funerals; Hengameh, having lost most of her family possessions twice, remained a compassionate nurse always aiming to cause little to no pain to her patients when drawing their blood. 

 

The theme of transformation and assuming new identities is also common throughout the stories: an adoption of a new language, religion, family and profession, all of which multiply connections to new mindsets and people. This never-ending movement is reflected in the ties merging all the objects and beings, the cyclical nature of the “murals” and their camouflage-like coloring. The unevenness of the oozing flow suggests the instability of such connections within a perpetual shared cycle of life. Yet the malleability of the shapes could signify a hope for change and healing in the following part of the cycle, or for the next generation. 

 

Moving countries, no matter the reason, entails leaving a familiar environment and facing an imminent adjustment. Life itself can be compared to an immigrant’s journey: we come to this foreign world with no possessions, vulnerable and clueless, learn a language and local customs, face adversity, grow and transform – which adds color to the whole experience; and just as we hopefully get acclimatized to the place, we must embark on another trip to an unknown destination. Perhaps a universal message of Muromtseva’s paintings is this: being an immigrant is a most natural human condition.

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Katya Muromtseva (b. 1990, USSR) is a visual artist currently based in New York. Muromtseva has had solo exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally, including the Nika Project Space (2024), Pushkin House (2023), Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial (2022), Art Front Gallery (2021), Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2021), XL Gallery (2021), M HKA Museum (2020) and the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (2018), among others. Muromtseva has participated in residencies including the Rockella Artist Residency (2023), WHW Academy (2020) and the Garage Studios & Art Residencies Moscow (2019). In addition to being the winner of the Present Continuous Program of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (2020), she received the Innovation Contemporary Art Prize (2020) and the Fulbright Fellowship (2020-2022). Muromtseva has been included in notable publications including Forbes Russia "30 under 30" (2020), as well as ArtForum, The Economist, The New York Times, The World and TokyoArtBeat, among others.