Kyiv. Ya Gallery

Exit to the city

Sisters Michelle and Nicole Feldman

24.05.2023 – 23.07.2023

Sisters Michelle and Nicole Feldman

"At the exhibition, you can completely turn off your mind and just enjoy pure visuality, trying to feel deep emotions or understand that the works do not evoke anything in you. Just do not try to find a hidden meaning here, because there is none. Just surrender to immersion in the world of visuals and enjoy these works, as if you were looking at paintings as a child, and you do not know the names of many objects. This exhibition is an attempt to create at least some order in our modern chaos, let it even be order in our madness" - say about the exhibition of the author, sisters Feldman.

Exhibition Kyiv Ya Gallery

First of all, according to Nicole and Michelle, they haven't painted on canvas for a long time, but it was during the full-scale invasion of 2022-2023 that they started and in the process took a break from everything. Visual relaxation is what is laid here, so that for a while the viewer can immerse himself in the world of Yoyo, feel himself inside a good cartoon, like "Adventure Time". This is a certain reflection of the experienced events - the expression of love for native places, the reproduction of the scenes of the streets of Kyiv and Odesa. The moment of sunset on "Saliut", the ascent or descent of the funicular on Poshtova Ploshcha, dancing on the Potomkin Stairs, the shore of the river or the sea - imprinting in the picture what you can see every day, but every time differently.

The second point is the perception of space: the paintings mostly feature urban subjects, and it is the way the artists see and broadcast it that draws attention. The artist paints small canvases separately, while maintaining the same style, and works together on the street and with large paintings.
In a way, the exhibition "Going to the City" is the transfer of the street hero Yoyo to the gallery format and the viewer's acquaintance with the art of the Feldman Sisters and further recognition of their plots around the city.
The yellow hero strolls around the city. Strolling is a term of French origin, which means a walk through the streets during which you get pleasure from contemplating city life. The same thing will happen at the exhibition: you, the visitors, will observe the city scenes in the paintings and maybe be inspired to continue this type of recreation on the streets of Kyiv.
Despite the martial law, the events of which permeate everything around us, there are reasons to rejoice simply by walking around the city, as the hero of the paintings does.
Yoyo is constantly in the urban space: either on the walls of buildings or inside paintings. Since their first visit to Kyiv at the age of 16, after an unsuccessful hitchhiking trip to Lviv, Michel and Nicole, standing on Khreshchatyk, realized that they love this city with a variety of architecture and a sense of freedom in any area. You can recognize this by watching the cartoon series "Yoyo", where already in the animation the character gets to Kyiv from the future and his adventures among people like him, not productive emotionless humanity.
Using the example of the paintings from the exhibition, you will notice that we all see the city differently, that buildings change not only their color depending on the light, and that when you enter from a different street, the space is broadcast in your mind in a different way. It is a call to explore the territory and find something special for yourself.
Author

The Feldman sisters are twins Michelle and Nicole. They were born in 1996 in Dnipro, where they lived for 18 years and instead of going to school, they were engaged in creativity from childhood. Their parents sent them to study only from the 6th to the 9th grade, after which they continued their home education: they were engaged in drawing, music and dancing.

"The parents didn't like the school themselves, so they told us if we didn't want to go there, we wouldn't go. But everything was great, because there was always company at home: brothers, sisters," says Nicole.