Katia Lifshin | Lunar Pathways

Lifshin invokes the rich cultural and art-historical symbolism of the garden as the natural world, positioning it as a recurring space and compositional motif, highlighting its possibility as both a place of sanctuary and a site of uncontrolled danger. The moon is an ever-present and recurring feature, and while it evokes a feeling of dreamlike serenity, it catches on the threshold of eerie otherworldliness. In Lifshin's paintings, the moon also operates as a metaphor for observation, as these figures, always watched, populate the endless turns of panoptic mazes and labyrinths. Here, the viewer is invited to consider for themselves, if these are spaces of safety and refuge, or as traps, ready to confine. Pictured in the act of tending to the spaces themselves, Lifshin further complicates the subject, questioning if these figures cultivate the very cages that cage them?

 

Lifshin’s worlds are evocative explorations of the complex, often contradictory, nature of the spaces we create for ourselves. Spanning the physical to the metaphorical, these enigmatic expanses reveal how personal, subjective and subconscious moments can intuitively merge with the universal and themselves contain a multitude of shifts – from light to darkness, across the spectrum of emotional space, across the boundaries of the body and between the realm of the human to the non-human - where limits and edges blur.