Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects is pleased to announce our second solo exhibition of drawings by Dasha Shishkin. In Shishkin’s works on Mylar, canvas, paper, and wooden panels she creates a fantastical world populated by a strange set of characters. They are engaged in intertwined narratives, imaginings, and deliberate activities that offer the viewer a glimpse into a strange yet purposeful reality.

The figures in Shishkin’s drawings, all ostensibly female, are costumed, extra-limbed and extra-faced, expressive, urban and bucolic all at once. Shishkin’s bold palette and use of polka dots and other patterns blurs the boundaries between individual bodies, the air, and surrounding objects in her drawings. In other works, Shishkin’s approach is spare. In “fire beats roses, again”, two women, rendered in green oil pastel on paper, are locked in an anxious stare. The drawing suggests that both bodies are nude, but the figure on the left is marked with a series of growths suggestive of eyes or nipples. Meanwhile, drawings like “saucy tricks for sticky sorts”, which depicts a belching volcano under a blood-red sun whilst animal-woman hybrid figures negotiate the foreground of this strange landscape, are resplendent with color and pattern. In other drawings pattern is used to represent the air filling in the space around the figures. Ultimately, however, the lines that make up the drawings are their driving force. The fluidity and mastery with which Shishkin imbues her drawings breathes an acidic humor into her figures and their surreal world a world that is delightful and cruel all at once.

Born in Moscow, Russia, Dasha Shishkin currently lives and works in New York, NY. She received her MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY (2006) and her BFA from the New School for Social Research, New York, NY (2001). In 2013 Shishkin had a major solo exhibition, erry icket, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Barbara. Other recent solo exhibitions include I Surrender, Dear at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; SAMMY at Galleria Gio Marconi, Milan, Italy; BB5, Grieffelkunst, Hamburg, Germany; and Desparecido, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, NY. Shishkins group exhibitions include Imaginary Portraits of Prince Igor, at Gallery Met, New York, NY; Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: Art from Russia, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK; Idealizing the Imaginary: Invention and Illusion in Contemporary Painting, Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, MI; and Embrace, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO. Dasha Shishkin is represented by Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, CA and Gio Marconi Gallery, Milan, Italy.