Yelena Popova

Born in: 1978
From: Urals, Russian Federation
Lives and works: Nottingham, United Kingdom
Represented by: Osnova Gallery
Website: https://www.yelenapopova.co.uk/

UN goals

Biography

Russian-born artist Yelena Popova grew up in Ozyorsk, a restricted city where the Soviet nuclear-weapon program originated. This upbringing has greatly influenced her work, using a variety of media including painting, video, and installation to delve into the massive industrialisation and energy crises that have afflicted our lands. Even after moving to the UK, she has continued her exploration of decommissioned nuclear sites. She does this in an effort to find where the balance lies between material and immaterial, but also in politics and aesthetics more broadly.

Popova’s work is infused with the legacy of artists who worked in the wake of the new atomic age post-WWII, where horrifying new possibilities and catastrophe held the world in a chokehold. The Milanese Arte Nucleare movement for example, founded notably by Enrico Baj, embodied this obsession with this confusing reality. In the contemporary artist’s work however, we find a more lighthearted angle, supplementing the subject with contrast.

In Yelena Popova’s study of forms and matter we can also find the hard curves of cogs and ethereal smoke of factories and steam engines. The rise of the Industrial Revolution, brought about by inventors such as James Watt or Edmund Cartwright, created a momentum for consumption that has been impossible to stop since then.