A proposal for Municipal Art Acquisitions 2001/2002. Concept/coordination Exhibition: Jan Hein Sassen, Renske Janssen.

The art of Tatyana Yassievich centres on personal and ultimate stories. Her paintings often show scenes of her birthplace, St. Petersburg. She seeks places she knows from personal memory, or which appeal through a certain atmosphere of association. Empty benches in a park or station, inside a café, a passing train, certainly images spurring nostalgia, but above all marinated in a sense of desolation. In Interior with a Painting on a Wall (1999), one of the four paintings in the exhibition, a painting hangs on a wall representing a work made by her grandfather. He wasa Russian painter in the period of 1930 to 1965, working in the official style of socialist realism. This style was notable for an anti-aesthetic depiction of the simple, every-day reality. In the later 1980s Yassievich was still being taught in this style at the Leningrad Academy of arts. This background still impacts on her work, but her depopulated locations also form a clear break with the simplicity of socialist realism imposed by higher authority. Interior with a Painting on a Wall contains the past of Russian art, and her own family are present but as a painting in a painting, as a relic of a period gone by and yet omnipresent on the street, in interiors and in people's heads. Renske Janssen, 2002

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

October 5, 2002–February 15, 2003