REVIEWS

Evgeniya Viktorovna Biktimirova goes by the artistic moniker of Jeny Bev, but the expansiveness and complexity of her art speak more of her long, clangorous and euphonious given name.

Trained as an architect as well as artist, Jeny Bev approaches painting as both space and object, image and structure, notation and presence. Her idea of painterly imagery is also multivalent, conflating the sophisticated and the folkloric with its elaborate fusions of imposing webbed lines and pliant, bubbly bodies, fierce eyes implying the presence of monstrous creatures and charming little presences suggesting dolls and fairies.

Jeny Bev’s is not an art that stands still; it oscillates between painterly gesture and imagistic fantasy, decorative excess and coloristic luminosity, the flatness of ink and stained pigment and the topographic elaboration of built-out surfaces.

Jeny Bev is clearly no minimalist, but her maximalism is more than a matter of her style or even substance: it defines her whole approach to making art, including everything her mind can conjure and her hand can generate. Iconic and yet dynamic, Jeny Bev’s work confronts the eye and then immediately takes it for a run or a dance, an adventure in a forest or a universe of constantly shifting spirits. One wishes she would take up animation, to set these confabulations in motion. Then one realizes that, for all intents and purposes, they are already in motion. Animation would be redundant: few works of contemporary painting are as animated as hers.

Peter Frank,
curator at the Riverside Art Museum,
art critic for Angeleno Magazine and the L.A. Weekly, “Visions Art Quarterly” , LA

I have discovered that the name “Evgeniya” is understood to represent sensitive, creative, and idealistic qualities “in the nature of the person ith this name; qualities that can be “expressed in a variety of literary or artistic fields“. How appropriate for our Architect/Painter.

The reference to the “literary” strikes me, as I can now begin to sense some of the hidden or secret “story” that lies within these artworks, a story that comes from Jeni.

This is the magic of really good architecture and really good art; and the sensibilities of both are now in full evidence in this artwork, which finds the latest chapter of its story on my Gallery walls.

Jeff Sulkin,
director “Sulkin/Secant Gallery”

Jeni Bev Biktimirova is a phenomenon in the art life of Russia, with her own unique artistic language. Using abstract sketches to build complex multi-dimensional installations, Jeni creates new spaces that are both autonomous art objects and working concepts for new architectural solutions.

Alla Shahmatova,
director “Vavilon Art Gallery”