Larissa Eremeeva is a Dutch artist who has moved around some in her life.  Every country in which she has lived has inspired her art – and every country has left enduring influences in her work.

Born in Russia, she studied art in Belgium.  After living and working in the Netherlands and the United States, her home is now in Abruzzo in Italy.

Having spent many years using art as a way to satisfy an obsession with human behaviour – in particular our strengths and vulnerabilities as we go about our daily lives – personal tragedy drove Eremeeva to turn her focus inwards … towards her own emotions. 

Significantly, this change of focus catalysed a transition from figurative painting to abstract … that was the only way to truly express her ideas and emotions on canvas.

“I became driven by ideas of transience and impermanence … mortality, eternity … the awareness of  generational threads that may bind or may break … how memories may be recalled and how memories may be erased.”

 And now, in her latest works, Eremeeva draws on themes of silence, poetry (especially that of Pessoa and Pasternak) and just living a life.

Ideas made emotion, expressed by texture and rhythm.

Eremeeva describes her process “as if pictures are tattooed inside my head”, initiating a sequence which defines the style, palette, medium and the scale of what she paints. The result is a style of painting which she calls “evocative abstract”.

Each work is a combination of days of introspection, visualisation and planning fused with intuitive elements that arise during the execution of the work. Watching Eremeeva paint is a visual poem as textures, marks and colour choice create a subtle compositional tension which, at the same time, is tranquil and serene.

The carefully curated titles of her works are intended to incite curiosity and a deeper examination of the piece.

While the resulting work can be viewed as pure abstract, she wants her paintings to evoke objects, feelings and memories for the viewer.

Whether these feelings and memories relate to those felt by her, the artist, is not important. What is important for Eremeeva, is that people who see her art may be stimulated to delve further and explore their own perceptions of the world and their own emotions.