KHLEBNIKOVA, Vera Mayevna

What the critics say - Vera Khlebnikova has a word to define what she does - "sentimentalism". New sentimentalism, let us say, a trend personal by definition, arousing feeling and, generally speaking, necessary to no one but the owner of old things. Vera Khlebnikova works with "ready-made" materials - with a real archive (which, by the way, came into her hands in dramatic circumstances), old newspapers, office memos and accounts that are combined into collages or "files" or are recorded in the newly created textures of the silk-screen process. Accumulation of temporal layers in the collages is simultaneously an examination of the break-up of the present which exposes its structure and sharpens our sensitivity to it. Archive trivia - useless and not worth saving - take on a new meaning on becoming "art"; made harmonious and artistically formed, the lives of unknown people seem to gain a historical justification. Old letters have a "sentimental aura" in themselves; but even such initially anti-human material as bureaucratic, soulless documents becomes warm and essential under the influence of time; blurred official stamps and the handwriting of an office clerk in an official form are transformed in a changed context into " beauty", uniquely capable of ensuring a real link between the departed and the present. 

G.Yelshevskaya