Olga Teksheva @ Rome Art Week

Olga Teksheva

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Olga Teksheva works as textile and mixed-media artist, and she also creates textile and fiber installations of large dimensions. Born in Moscow in 1973, she takes BA and MA in art history at Lomonosov University of Moscow (1996) and takes BA and MA in drawing and painting at Liudmila Ermolaeva Studio (2006). She also teaches Art History, History of Fashion and History of Costume at National Institute of Design (Moscow, 2000 - 2008). She leaves Moscow to Rome in 2008 to get a european BA in Fashion and Costume Design and gets her diploma at Accademia di costume e di moda in 2012.

From 2015 she develops some mixed-media series on canvas and on paper. In 2017 she gets her first personal show "Once Upon a Time There Was a Fish Sitting on a Tree" at Villino Corsini (Villa Pamphili), with her first large-scale fibre installation. After a few group shows at Pavart Roma gallery and Counterweave gallery, in 2019 Olga is selected in "Special Mention" category for contemporary art fair Art Rooms Rome. She presents two large-scale fiber installations: one as a special project for Ford Italia (after the fair the installation is donated to the MAAM Museum in Rome) and "Where the Mermaids Hide Their Tails / Tales". In 2020 Pavart Roma holds the second personal show of the artist, "In Volo". In 2021 two Olga's artworks of the "Dragonfly" series take part in contemporary art festival SyArt, curated by Rossella Savarese at Fondazione Sorrento. Another piece of the "Dragonfly" series wins the International Fiber Art competition "Trame a Corte" (Parma) as the First Prize. The wall sculpture "Dreamcatcher: Wabi V" is selected to participate in the Triennial "Textile Art of Today" (Slovak Republic, Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland) and is nominated for the Enviro Award.

The choice of working with textiles and fibers comes from Olga's passion for traditional textile manipulation techniques (embroidery, crocheting, weaving, quilting). Today they are seen more as "makers' activity", like a tradition with a well-determined, rigid rules. The artist keeps traditional techniques of embroidery or stitching, or crocheting, but uses distressed materials and unexpected combinations, to get rid of "makers'", "artigianal" aspects of textile art. The freedom to play and to experiment. Thus a traditional cross-stitch becomes "crazy", irregular, multi-layered surface. And chiffon torn in long pieces is crocheted and then melted in oven, to get some surreal sculptural effects. The research of textures and colours starts with natural objects (pebbles, leaves, sea-shells) and is enriched with the emotions and thoughts inspired by the artist's family history or History of Art.

For the 2021 edition of the Rome Art Week Olga presents her first curatorial project, together with Australian artist Felicity Griffin Clark: "Surface and Depth" show of 67 international artists, members of the S.E.W. (Society for Embroidered Work, of which Olga is a member from 2018), at Palazzo Velli Expo in Trastevere. She also takes part in the group show "Red Zone" curated by Velia Littera at Pavart Roma gallery.