Olga Tobreluts

2002

Photography, 120 x 150 cm.
Materials: photo; ink on paper

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp / Donated by the artist, 2013 (Inv. no. S0485_03).

Born in 1970 in Murino, Leningrad Oblast, Russia, Olga Tobreluts was trained as an architect but is now an accomplished artist who works with photography, video, painting and sculpture. Since the 1990s Tobreluts quitted painting altogether to focus on computer graphics combined with photography and 3D models. She became a pioneer of the digital art movement in Russia. Tobreluts’ artistic approach evokes the ideas of Neo-Academism followers when she strives for achieving a realistic resemblance between the 3D image of a human body created with the aid of the computer and that represented in the form of an academic drawing. 

Olga Tobreluts explores the adaptive evolution in human visual perception in the 21st century and offers new forms of visual expression that discuss the simulation of reality and “realness” in our advanced technological age. As one of the first contemporary artists who picked modern computer technologies as a medium she developed her own singular yet extremely recognizable style. Tobreluts’s artworks appear to be intricate manipulations, in which historical realities and myths of modern culture are melted together for the purpose of transforming them into a magical super reality.