Valeria Salnikova was born in Murmansk, graduated from an art school in the north of Russia in the coal-mining town of Vorkuta, and received her higher education at the Department of Painting, majoring in Graphic Design, already in Moscow. In recent years Valeria has worked as a special projects designer at Harper’s Bazaar and as art director at Avon. She has taken part in exhibitions at the Louvre, the Pierre Cardin House in Paris, and the Town Hall in Oxford.
Valeria was influenced by the works of Pablo Picasso — his Cubist style and Blue Period, their recognisable colours and lines. The artist calls her style “Picassism,” since many of her painting techniques resemble the hand of her idol.
The project features works created during lockdown, a time when the artist held hope that her practice might finally step offline. “Likolation” is a series of portraits of twenty people from different countries who answered a call to have their portraits painted — in this way Valeria sought to kindle courage and hope for a swift return to ordinary life.
The work “Overcoming Distances” turns the viewer toward pure emotion and the state of the inner child, who longs to break free and genuinely cannot understand why borders are closed, and why those close to them can only be seen through the screens of gadgets everyone has grown tired of.