Elena Sarni has been an artist since her conscious life began.  Born in the now-vanished Soviet Union, she considers her Russian cultural inheritance a vital aspect of her intellectual biography.  She emigrated at young age and has since lived and worked in the cultural centers of Europe, a fact which has contributed to the markedly cosmopolitan reputation attached to her work.  For the last fifteen years, she has lived in the United States, chiefly in New York City.
            Ms. Sarni holds degrees in art and art history.  She has had numerous personal exhibitions, and innumerable group shows, in New York, London, Paris and other capitals of the art world.  Her works are in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and in important collections both in Europe and the US.

            Elena Sarni’s art is widely admired for its technical perfection and conceptual originality.  She works with the most recognizable and established images in the Western artistic canon to divert attention from notions of “message” and focus it upon the artistic endeavor itself.  In the current exhibition, Ms. Sarni takes this further than ever, using not merely the archetypical subjects of the European tradition, but parts of the canonical artworks themselves – fragments of Roman frescos or Fayum portraits, Michelangelo or Matisse, and even her own earlier works.  While this kind of interpolation typically amounts simply to an “intertextual” exercise, in Ms. Sarni’s paintings the introduced works become concrete objects physically present in the painterly space – the very objects, in fact, whose arrangement consistitutes the composition of her paintings.
            These “imports” are made to coexist with other objects, often of a strikingly different nature.  In her explorations of the artistic method, Ms. Sarni always seeks to synthesize modes of artistry traditionally assigned to distinct and apparently incompatible genres.  In Still Life as Landscape, she combines paintings-as-objects with schematically represented figures, polychrome with monochrome, artifacts of antiquity or European classicism with icons of aggressively modern art.  She groups her objects within an artistic, otherworldly “zero-space” whose painterly meaning is driven home by strong texturing and subtle shifts in hue.
            After the experiment with lush, almost lurid colors in Mythology and Thereabouts, her previous series, Still Life as Landscape marks Elena Sarni’s return to her characteristic, quintessentially muted hues.  This mode is now driven to a new extreme: the paintings contain the entire universe of color, but Ms. Sarni draws in the reins of their expression with a firm hand.  The resulting scheme is at once rich and hushed, colors of crystalline purity interacting over the surface of the work, forming complex relationships in chiseled, finely balanced harmonies.

            “I suggest that the audience regard a painting as an iconic sign.  Such a sign makes no distinction between itself and its object.  The traditions of icon painting can serve as a model of the iconic sign: the icon physically becomes that which it depicts, but at the same time it reveals the hidden significance of its object.  It is a concrete object whose meaning, as the viewer interacts with it, shifts to the level of the universal.  The paradox is that the shift in meaning is the iconic sign itself.  The substantive and medial roles of my works coincide, making each piece a conductor leading from the physical world to the world of ideas."
—Elena Sarni