13 april 2025, Flor Linckens
Last chance: intimacy in pixels and paint at Westerkadekunst
In the exhibition 'Really Real Reality' at Westerkadekunst in Rotterdam, Anastasia K. presents a series of oil paintings in which personal migration stories intertwine with universal questions of home, identity and connection. The exhibition, on view until 21 April, offers a glimpse into a larger body of work: 182 portraits from a series of 400, which the artist intends to complete this year.
With these paintings, Anastasia is constructing a new kind of home. Not one made of bricks or furniture, but of faces. Each portrait forms part of a network of people she has encountered since arriving in the Netherlands. Some she met on the street, others in her immediate surroundings, and still others only online. “For several years now, I’ve been contemplating the concept of home — is it a place, is it people, or is it thoughts?" she writes. "With these 400 paintings, I am constructing my new home, based on a new environment, as so much has changed over these years, and I’ve started from scratch.”
In the exhibition space, the paintings form a rhythmic pattern of equal-sized works: a wall-spanning grid of small, nearly square canvases on which eyes, noses, mouths and faces gaze back at us in close up. These portraits, expressive, vivid and unembellished, seem to show people as they truly are. Smiling, frowning or marked by fatigue, uncertainty or curiosity. Painted in oil that appears to breathe life into their faces, the works touch on something both deeply personal and recognisably human. The technique reveals the artist's classical training, while the result feels unmistakably contemporary. Her use of colour is warm and grounded in realism.
Some faces are painted from extreme angles, with exaggerated foreheads or swollen noses, as if frozen mid-pose during a video call. These works belong to the parallel series "Unreal Real Reality", in which the artist depicts loved ones who are physically far away but remain digitally close. Anastasia explains: “It’s a series about people who make up my virtual present. These are the loved ones who live thousands of kilometers away and whom I’ve known only online for a long time. They are real, the same as I’ve always known them, but they cannot be touched or embraced. We can only meet online, talk to each other, and see their funny faces from strange angles, speaking through our phones.” In some of these paintings, the artist turns the gaze on herself, presenting self-portraits from the alienating perspective of a front-facing camera. In a world where digital communication sometimes replaces physical contact, new forms of intimacy and estrangement emerge at once.
The contrast between the two series – those she met in person and those who exist only on screen – reinforces the underlying theme of migration. What does it mean to feel at home when parts of your life remain anchored thousands of kilometres away? What does it mean to start over? And to what extent does your environment shape your identity, or do you inevitably carry your history with you?
Anastasia K.’s practice is fuelled by a deep engagement with history, war and psychology. She is particularly drawn to questions of identity and the fragile boundary between external influence and personal agency – the ability to steer one’s own life, independent of the forces that have shaped it. To what extent can a person truly make their own choices, free from the influences of family, culture or societal structures? How much of our life is decided by ourselves?
