NATASHA YUDINA

EUR 19,000 + VAT

Venus in Fur, 2017 

Fur and mixed media

70 x 25 x 25cm

About this work

Yudina says that ‘Venus wandering in the snow, wrapped up in fur becomes the standard of Siberian beauty’ – the snow echoing marble. But fur can also be associated with Freudian motifs, or as she puts it ‘Scary Siberian Dreams’ that cover high art with fur, reducing it to sensual animal instinct. It may be no coincidence, then, that ‘Venus in Furs’ is the title of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s famous story exploring masochism, a taste for which may help in the Siberian context as Yudina describes it.

NATASHA YUDINA BIOGRAPHY

Siberian artist Natasha Yudina (born Tomsk, Russia, 1982) has a delightfully straightforward reason for wrapping her sculptures in fur: it’s very cold in Tomsk! So ‘art in Siberia needs to be warmed up’. That foregrounds fur’s comforting aspect. But, as she points out, the brute fact is that it’s the skin of a dead animal – or person: it is estimated that there were over 400,000 political prisoners in Siberia in the 1930’s: 130,000 of them were shot, quite apart from those who starved or succumbed to the cold and disease. Her sculptures have a savage potential for irony.