Pears

Nina Kotel’s genre of choice is conceptual still life: rhythmic piling up of typologically related objects. She mostly paints everyday things from life, focusing on their interesting shapes. In her compositions, objects appear as if caught by peripheral vision, stealthily, which imbues them with a dynamic quality verging on abstraction. In her early series Offcuts (1982), abstract cuttings of mount were accompanied by an image of a safety razor.

In the series Unprotected, peeled fruit and vegetables are in most cases—unusually for Kotel—located in the center of the composition. Their shape caught her attention, she explains, due to its similarity to the cliffs and seas of romantic landscapes. In a separate, monumental composition we can see a trail of peels from the individual objects in the series: a reference to the paper Offcuts.

Removing the familiar outer layer, Kotel reveals the complex plasticity of organic matter. Curiously, the meticulously painted facets of peeled fruit bring to mind the careful geometric strokes of Cezanne and his Russian followers from the Jack of Diamonds group. Perhaps the way a chef prepares fruit and vegetables is not that different from an artist “preparing” objects before putting them onto the surface of the painting?

Kotel started working on this series, which has previously been exhibited as Without Skin, in 1995 and later returned to it in 2001. She did not show it to anyone until her solo exhibition Unprotected (2001) at Krokin Gallery, where it was shown together with some new variations on the theme.