Anka Akhalaia. The Veil of Words

About the exhibition

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the Triumph Gallery present Anka Akhalaia's exhibition A Veil of Words within the framework of Young Lions, their joint programme.

Anka’s new series is based on The Magnetic Fields poem by the inventors of French surrealism André Breton and Philippe Soupault. Published in 1919 in the Litterature journal, it became the first work ever written in the technique of automatic writing, a key surrealist creative method. Automatic writing aims to disable the voice of reason and helps write to the dictation of the unconscious, preventing the mind from making critical judgments.

Anka Akhalaia uses this creative method in her artistic practice to visualize spontaneous images, emotional states and feelings through abstract forms. Anka intentionally deprives compositions of semantic content, creating a valence space for the audience to construct their own interpretations. Thus, the audience's interaction with Anka’s art hinges on establishing a personal connection between the work and one's emotional response.

The exhibition includes 15 oil paintings. Working mainly with abstraction, the artist prefers soft translucent colour spots that create a unique light and aerial ambience of her works, with amorphous whimsical lines randomly dissecting or swirling the compositions. Anka’s method is characterised by the inclusion of text fragments in abstract compositions, in this series these are quotations from The Magnetic Fields.

About the artist

Anka Akhalaia was born in 1998 in Moscow. She graduated from the British Higher School of Design and the University of Hertfordshire and took part in the R.A.R.O. Art Residency in 2019 in Madrid. She specializes in abstraction, and her works are part of private Russian and international collections. Anka is based in Moscow and Tbilisi.

Young Lions

Young Lions is a Triumph Gallery programme aimed to support contemporary art, launched in 2015. It features artists that have already been represented in major exhibitions and are familiar to the public, laureates and nominees of art prizes. The Young Lions programme invites artists to premiere their personal projects in the museum's exhibition spaces, with a new context casting new light on their works.

Coorganizers

The Triumph Gallery was founded by Yemelyan Zakharov and Dmitry Khankin in 2006. Today, the gallery works with major Russian and international artists. The Triumph Gallery strives to find new voices and perspectives in culture. The gallery presents contemporary art through a diverse programme that includes solo and group exhibitions, institutional projects and research initiatives.