When death meets art, you have to play safe in order not to get into controversy; When I met Maria Ionova Gribina and her series “Natura Morta”, I understood that Russians do it fucking better.
Taking a look into her website, I was totally paralyzed by the grace and the grotesque sense of redemption that her works gave to my soul.
As you can see from the pictures, she tries to couple the clear face of a concrete death with the beauty and the fertility of the blossom, but how does it actually work?
Basically, she uses dead animals’ bodies found on the streets (so 80% dead from a violent death) and tries to give them a second life celebrating their ‘funeral’, adding colorful details and fresh flowers to their dead figure.
I see this situation as a marvelous way to ‘post-produce’ and blur the lines between death and life and for me, the result is a simply delicate but concrete celebration of what is next after our temporary permanence on this planet.
