One of the less obvious optics of contemporary art is to create conceptual images that embody epochs and tectonic shifts in socio-cultural paradigms. In this sense, it is interesting to observe how decades are associated in our minds with symbols or creatures invented in the laboratories of contemporary art. Melted clocks, howling deformed Roman popes, multicoloured soup cans, giant mushrooms, potato women, striped flags, and bad but very expensive graphics on the dilapidated walls of London streets—these are just a few of the vividly recognisable signs and beings of the bygone era of the development of contemporary art. The post-Covid era in which we are destined to live now, full of wars, meaningless political wanderings, and a general sense of frustration, seems to reset everything that was before 2022 but also gives contemporary artists a unique chance to invent symbols and creatures that embody the total modernity of the third decade of the 21st century. Only the bravest artists dare not only to do this in their artistic practice but also to openly articulate and declare it in their artist statements.
One such artist is Tanya Stashkova. She describes her artistic method as a conscious study of the symbiosis between human and non-human agents. Her works are imbued with the motif of a desperate attempt to find the boundary between the human and the non-human. The roots of her method are apparently to be found in ancient cultures, which were much bolder and more ingenious in inventing the appearances of non-existent beings than modern ones. Where the ancient Greeks invented sirens and centaurs and the ancient Sumerians invented bearded sphinxes, Tanya Stashkova invents people with the heads of cats and dogs. However, her creatures are not strange mutants from comics and popular culture, but extremely comfortable beings who have hidden their alterity behind the attributes of social norms. They are dangerous and strange in essence, but not in form. Their form refers to the painted napkins that hang on the oven handle in your harmless grandmother’s kitchen or on the briefcase of your sibling going to ballet classes after school.
Stashkova’s creatures are a warning about someone’s disguise. The artist plays on our social expectations and therefore creates such beings that test the strength of our attitude towards the radically alien. What does our first glance tell us when we see a half-human, half-animal creature? What does our sense of social anxiety tell us when we see a stranger shining with the attributes of dubious security? Tanya Stashkova’s works, especially the “Gentlemen” series, are an impressively constructed, dizzying test of the boundaries of tolerance and empathy, a merciless diagnosis exposing our superficiality.
Her art is the highest professionalism of the artist’s visual thinking, crossed with the excitement of socio-critical experimentation. Provocative, bright, trickster art by Stashkova challenges all established conventions but, at the same time, remains a high-class product of gallery and art journal processes. Her unusual perspective is a phenomenon akin to a mutation or synergistic explosion for contemporary art as a sphere of privileged individuals. Her art is a challenge that gently expands the boundaries of meanings, images, and connotations associated with contemporary art and contemporary society. This is a subtle work that undermines old, dysfunctional hierarchies and advocates freedom, the infinity of interpretations, and the responsibility of the author passed on to the viewer and the viewer to the future that could have been better. The future will be better.
Tanya Stashkova’s art deserves the closest attention, critical coverage, and academic study. Probably the images from her best works will be able to become illustrations of the era of 2020–2030, as a time when man questioned all possible status quos and sought the forever-lost opportunity to distance himself through art from the passions of the raging century, if only for a moment.
