Olga Goldina Hirsch is an artist with her own complex symbolic universe. Her artworks unravel in front of the viewer as a journey through memory. In her paintings, she investigates the possibility of representing episodes of long-lost memories on the two-dimensional plane through creating spatial depths and layers of transparent tones. The lost memories appear as blank spaces and voids in the compositional structure, thus, symbolising the gaps in time, the obliterated reminiscences, the events erased from history and still waiting to be recovered and restored. They become special leitmotifs in her series of paintings entitled as “Mnemosyne” and “My Anti-Worlds”.

In her current artworks, Olga has moved towards airy, light, vibrant, inspirational open spaces that in her painterly language, represent recovered memories saved from oblivion. By exploring her works, one can trace the trajectory of her artistic and personal evolution.

The artist works in mixed media. She believes that combinations of media correlate with her layered messages and subtle movements of the human psyche. Her artworks are like palimpsests, and each viewer may focus on a specific layer. Word and image are intertwined in her creations: her paintings are frequently accompanied by short stories, essays, or poems.

Olga’s works can be found in the Copelouzos Family Art Museum, Athens; in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vladivostok and in private collections across the UK, France, Italy, Canada, and the USA. In 2022, she became winner of the runner-up prise of the TEBBS International Art Award and was listed as member of the Taylor Foundation, Paris.

In 2021, a painting from Olga’s series “Who Am I?” was featured in the acclaimed catalogue of Le Salon des Artistes Françaises. Posters with Olga’s works regularly appear on London tube stations (twice at Pimlico and for the first time at Hyde Park Corner this July) as part of the critically acclaimed “Art Below” public programme. On New Year’s Eve and in June 2024, her digital paintings were displayed on the iconic Times Square screens in Broadway Plaza, New York. Eventually, we decided to celebrate her career with an interview.

Olga, how did you start taking part in the “Art Below” programme? The posters with your works from “Child Again” series are very life-asserting.

I was delighted to take part in this programme and I am most grateful to “Ad Lib” gallery for selecting my works and for believing in me. I would also like to give my special thanks to my kind sponsor Cazenove Capital, whose support made this project possible. I am also delighted to say, that my recent painting “The Solstice Begins! Summer” was displayed at the Hyde Park Corner Station in London from mid-July onwards.

As for “Art Below”, it has nurtured an international community of artistic talent and has displayed the works of numerous artists in London, Tokyo, Berlin, and Los Angeles. Artists that have taken part in previous Art Below campaigns include Banksy, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, David Bailey, D*Face, Alison Jackson, Polly Morgan, Gavin Turk, Nasser Azam, Ben Thouard, and many others. Needless to say, I am honoured to find myself in such a worthy and talented company.

And the display in Broadway Plaza?

It was a digital Group Exhibition organised by “Artist Talk” Magazine. The most recent show took part in June 2024. Prior to that it was showing on Times Square in New York on this New Year’s Eve and displayed my poem alongside the reproduction of my painting. In many of my works word and image go hand in hand.

And could you quote your favourite lines from this New Year poem?

New York, New York, your gentle light
Blends seamlessly into the night.
As the moon glows sun-like in the dark,
Beaming hope from behind us,
Promising a night full of wonders,
The electronic display lights up
Guiding our way home.
…It is New Year again!
Follow the urge to make a wish and believe,
That everything will stay the same for a long time,
Year after year,
New York, New York...

Thank you! It is a wonderful New Year wish. I understand that although you became an artist (and an author), it was not like this all the time. Prior to becoming an artist, you had a successful career in medical sciences and in the 1990s you even launched your own medical business. Is it true?

Yes, you are right. I completed my PhD in Biology and prior to my move to the United Kingdom, I ran my own medical business that worked on the new generation of blood substitutes. However, as I got married for the first time and moved to London in 2011, that was no longer possible. So, my new life as an artist began.

After I moved to London, I found myself living inside a beautiful fairy tale. This feeling is now gone, but back then everything seemed magical to me. That experience reminded me of my childhood. And some British habits seemed to have emerged straight out of my childhood days: leaving a key under the doormat, small bakeries with bread loaves on wooden shelves which had to be picked off with tongs. People were friendly, polite, calm, smiling—exactly like the ones I remember from my early days. I also found the British to be an immensely creative nation. And this is how I gradually began to look for learning opportunities in the sphere of art.

Can you say that you continue your family traditions by becoming an artist?

Perhaps, yes. I grew up in a family with strong artistic leanings and traditions. My grandfather was a futurist writer, a friend of the Burliuk brothers, and a journalist who became famous for his experimental novel trilogy “The Yellow Devil” and for his documentary reportage “My Chinese Diaries,” written in the early 1920s. Both made him famous.

My grandmother worked as assistant in the architectural bureaus of Moisei Ginzburg and the Vesnin Brothers, the founding fathers of Russian Constructivism. She also met with Le Corbusier in 1928, and I still remember her stories. Many years later my grandmother recognised some of her 1920s architectural drawings exhibited at the “Moscow-Paris” art show which took place in June-October 1981, at the State Pushkin Museum of Arts (and at the Pompidou Centre of Arts in Paris prior to that). She gave me my first art lessons. As a child of eight, I could unmistakably identify whether the artworks were painted by Matisse, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Fernand Léger, or Amedeo Modigliani. Modigliani, with his tragic life and his moving artistic destiny, was, indeed, special to me.

The relatives on my father’s side were surgeons, performing pianists, composers and musicologists. My grandfather, who was a professional surgeon, had also tried his hand as an amateur artist in the days of his youth: he even designed movie posters to supply his meagre student income!

Nowadays, as I look at my little niece Margarita, I grow more and more convinced that the art gene runs in our family. We have recently started our collaboration on a new series of works. Although Margarita is only 4, I am amazed at her ability, her absolute freedom and sense of colour. She has recently been working on her first large canvas, 140 x 160 cm, and she managed the composition completely by herself. She was simultaneously amazed and delighted with the result!

Nevertheless, when I was a child, I wanted to become a scientist. Even though art and literature were part of my home upbringing. So, on completing my secondary school education, I applied to a medical school and began to study science, which is also a creative discipline, if approached properly.

And when did you understand that you finally became a professional artist?

Probably, when I earned my MA in Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School in 2018. That year became a watershed in my life that marked the transition from amateur to professional artist and launched my artistic career. I still consider my MA in Fine Art my major achievement.

However, quite unexpectedly to myself, I set the goal to become a professional artist in 2012. So, I began my studies by taking life drawing classes at the Putney School of Art and Design, which was very informal and very inclusive. The learning process was so unobtrusive and so well organised, that one could end up with the feeling that everything that we learned there we picked up easily and effortlessly, as if of its own accord and without much interference from our course tutor. I also took a short course in drawing at Slade School of Fine Art. However, I was still thinking of art as my pastime at that stage. It all became serious only a few years ago.

For you, what does it take to be an artist?

I would only say that an artist needs to be bold and sincere, vulnerable and ready to experiment, introspective and reaching out to the world. An artist is also someone who is ready to lose one’s own self and rediscover it again. It is a person who never rests on their laurels. In a way, these are very childlike qualities: childhood is a state of utmost sincerity and authenticity in one’s creative expression; it is also a passion for constantly learning something new. Actually, my recent series “Child Again” explores these ideas.

Your artworks can now be found in private collections worldwide. How has this global outreach influenced your artistic identity, and what do you think attracts such a diverse audience to your work?

Some people just like my works, as my paintings may resonate with them. Initially, I did not keep track of who purchased my paintings and where they travelled to.

However, I have started to do so now, as I receive more invitations from private collectors and various charitable organizations to participate in their projects, as was the case with the Copelouzos Family Art Museum in Athens, Greece. They acquired two of my works for their museum collection.

I did not take any special efforts to contact them, they found me themselves. And I am pleased that my paintings ended up with the people who seem to understand what my work is about. I also participated in several art projects run by the Brooklyn Library, but unfortunately it had to close.

If you ask me about what draws different people to my works, it is difficult for me to give you a definite answer. Perhaps, something is stirring deeply within their souls when they look at my artworks. Sometimes, it is a fragment of an image, a sound, or an association in my artwork that resonates with them. I work with memory, with notions of transgenerational trauma, and also with the sense of release from the past, the experiences of healing and freedom. Perhaps they can intuit this in my paintings and connect to the sentiments expressed in them?

Currently, I am looking to expand my outreach and establish contacts with new galleries and collectors. I am still looking for “my audience," who enjoy being intrigued by complex, multi-layered artworks with their own philosophy.

So, please, tell us more about your philosophy and your artistic practice.

Generally, an existential state or a fleeting emotion are the starting points in my creative process, not a theme, or an intellectual subject that I impose on myself. Themes are rather secondary to my work. Each canvas is born out of an emotional impulse, a certain state. I attempt to capture and convey my emotional and intellectual experiences, be this anxiety, joy, peace, inspiration, or fear. And then, a theme, or a major motif of my work(s), may crystallise in the process of working.

And this is exactly how my recent cycle, “The Pilgrims”, came about. It began with the musings on my own destiny, my origins, and my purposes, and then the idea of pilgrimage occurred to me. Having moved to the UK, I realised what it was to be a wanderer, a stranger who had to live their life in a different way. This is how my interest in “nostalgia” was born and my first large-format artwork “The Shadows of the Past” was painted. It was followed by a bunch of graphic works, paintings, and short essays. Up to that point, I had not been particularly fond of Joseph Brodsky, but somehow his early poem, “The Pilgrims” of 1958, came to my notice, and it felt like a revelation. I realised that no matter where we lived, we remained eternal wanderers, from our first to our last day; our encounters as we progressed through life were the most important gifts to us, especially if they left traces in our soul and took roots in it. That is how the artworks were born.

Then, as I hoped to find a compromise between figuration and abstraction, as well as to bring together the past and present in my works, my other series, entitled as “Who am I?” (2019), began to take shape. In our lives, self comes first. However, ourselves may change, take different guises. So, in this series, I represent our perception of self as a shirt which can be put on and shed, like old skin, or continued wearing until it gets threadbare. I interrogate identity, and the elements it is made of. Having explored that subject, I then returned to my “Pilgrims” series, on which I have incessantly been working for over five years and continue today. For me, this series combines the past, the present and the future, although it might not look particularly bright at this moment.

Talking about my art in general, I could probably say that I work with “the failing memory," i.e., suppressed or obliterated memories of historical and personal events, mostly traumatic. At a certain stage, such blocked or obliterated memories become the guarantee of survival for a whole family or a whole nation. However, suppression of memories always has consequences. Ousting painful traumatic events leads to their recurrence in personal life and national history, until we heal them. I started doing so by exploring my own family’s history, which meant recovering lost documents and archival photos, filling the gaps with relevant facts, and recovering lives and erased memories from oblivion.

This process also found its expression in my artistic practice. I started by delving into my own “black square," i.e., by reclaiming the fragments of the long-forgotten memories out of the “black holes” of oblivion. As everything I could find about the past was so fragmented, my first works came out as collages, consisting of old photos, family drawings, soundscapes, poetry and recovered documents. The areas of oblivion were also represented by blank spaces and areas of white colour. With the time, I became aware that the compositional void is not entirely blank but is replete with information and messages. Therefore, my choice of colours was and still is dictated by my emotions, memories, and dreams. White stands for the space replete with information that must be recovered or re-accessed. A combination of metallic and fluorescent paints captures the flashback-like moments in time, the sudden outbursts of memories or insights related to past events.

However, this is no longer what I am seeking to explore. My initial interest in building on contrast, on clashing contrasting states, images, and experiences, has transformed into a quest for the variety of colours. I am moving away from monochrome to polychrome compositions.

You also mentioned that you prefer your compositions multi-layered. How did this awareness come to you?

My works are mostly interactions of word and image, or to be more precise, my works are intertextual. My paintings always have semantic and textual content, and this is what makes them multi-layered, in the first place.

For instance, whilst I was working on a triptych “By the Window” for an art exhibition in 2017, I was transfixed by the phrase from the novel “Venus’ Hair” (also known as “Maidenhair” in English translation) written by Mikhail Shishkin: “The leaves’ shadow turns the road ribbon to guipure.” To me, this sentence, which alludes to a similar phrase in V. Nabokov, became a revelation, a key to my multi-layered technique. So, my images are always laden with multiple meanings; they are intertextual visions, if I may say so. And this is what stands behind my painterly multi-layering technique.

One can see numerous images of hands and feet in your work. Does this have any meaning?

If we look at the history of mediaeval art, especially the early religious art, faces, hands and sometimes feet conveyed the character of the protagonists in the composition. This particularly refers to private devotional or altar images. So, I take this philosophy into the twenty first century. For me, a foot is synonymous and interchangeable with a footstep or a trace left by a person. And hands can sometimes be substitutes for a face because they carry so much information about a person!

Are there any projects you are fond of or proud of?

I am very fond of my project called “A Tale of a Snowflake Named Anna.” It is a Christmas fairy-tale that I personally wrote and illustrated. It was inspired by the story of ballerina Anna Pavlova and a chance encounter with the keeper of Anna Pavlova’s grave at Golders Green Cemetery. I do hope that I will finally manage to publish it.

Is there anything new you would like to try your hand at?

I would love to try my hand at some large urban design project, I really love street art.

I also dream of working as a stage designer, perhaps somewhere on Broadway: I used to make sets for amateur plays, and I still remember how greatly I enjoyed that. Besides, inspired by the example of Leonora Carrington, I painted walls in a few houses. So, I feel that I am ready for this challenge. I am aware that these are ambitious plans, but I have always been ambitious in a positive way. This is what has made my life so eventful and interesting.

What are you looking forward to?

I am looking very much forward to my upcoming exhibition "The Solstice Begins!" which is due to take place at Coningsby Gallery in Fitzrovia, London, this September. It will feature my new works and showcase the “White Room” installation which combines painting and an evocative soundscape.

Olga Goldina Hirsch's solo show The Solstice Begins! will run at Coningsby Gallery, London, between 16 and 22 September, 2024.