Katerina Belkina
Katerina Belkina ( born 1974, Samara, Russia) is a Russian contemporary pictoralist photographer and painter. She digitally manipulates many of her photographs to appear as paintings, and often uses herself as the model in her work. Life. Belkina grew up in an artistic family. Her mother was also an artist. From 1989 Belkina studied at the Art School and the Petrow-Vodkin art academy in Samara. From 1994 to 1999 she worked at the publishing house Fedorow in Samara. In 2000 she started to study at the Michael-Musorin school for photography in her hometown where she studied till  2002. At the same time she worked as a computer graphic designer at a Russian television channel. In 2007, Belkina was nominated for the Russian Kandinsky Prize. In 2009/2010 she was at the 1st Photo Biennale of the Russian Museum at the Marble Palace in St. Petersburg. In 2011, she was in the framework of the Fourth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, an exhibition curated by Tatiana Kurtanova. In 2015, she was awarded the International Lucas-Cranach-Preis. In 2016, she won the Hasselblad Masters’ Competition with a self-portrait as a pregnant woman. Belkina is a member of the  Union of Russian Photographers. Work. Belkina's photographic work is strongly influenced by the painting. It focuses entirely on portraits. In recent years she mainly focused on staged self-portraits. The series "Paint" combined picturesque and photographic elements and reinterpreted paintings by famous painters. The series "Hieroglyph" consists of body fragments, processed for a collage. The series "Empty Spaces" was created in 2010/11. Here she staged herself in a chilly style in front of urban skylines. Her artworks were published, for example, in "Photo Art", "Twill", "Kunstbeeld.NL", "Eyemazing", the "Monthly Art Magazine", "Fine Art Photo", "Zebra", "National Geographic" and  in the Russian "Gala", Photo Biennale of the Russian Museum.