Description

Alena’s art combines the ancient Asian style of Japanism, which has long inspired European contemporary art, including the Impressionists. Van Gogh himself, whom Alena admires, reproduced Japanese work by Hiroshige and Keisai Eisen and worked with the distinctively Asian emphasis on nature as a subject, creating Almond Blossom (1890) to great posthumous acclaim. When admiring Alena’s series of her Butterflies series, Damien Hirst inevitably comes to mind. For Hirst, butterflies symbolize death and resurrection. For Alena, they are a moral ideal illustrated in her oeuvre, with an extensive and rich reference to museum quality artworks.