By Anthony Fawcett, the esteemed art critic and historian, once served as John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s personal curator. His illustrious career includes introducing Man Ray to London, collaborating with icons like Andy Warhol, and assuming pivotal roles in leading art institutions. Fawcett is renowned for his 80 historical interviews with legends such as Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Jean Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, Gilbert & George and many others.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
— William Shakespeare
Sofia Segalla is a trailblazing, incendiary artist and fashion designer who was born in Moscow. Multi-talented, her oeuvre includes drawing, collage and fashion, utilizing her digital toolbox. Ceaselessly changing forms, her work is imbued by ‘Post-Soviet’ visual culture.
Segalla trained in fashion design and describes her artworks as rooted in “the intersection of visual art becoming a ‘wearable identity’.” Influenced by early Pop culture, she uses herself and her clothes to create a very personal mythology.
“Human imagination, by the invention of myths, has created a cosmos consonant to our preconceptions, a cosmos in which causation is passionate and is an expression of love or hate, in which there are heavenly powers to be placated by the same means that are found efficacious with earthly monarchs, in which the whole gamut of human emotions is projected upon the outer world in all its variegated confusion.”
— Bertrand Russell, Myth and Magic, 1954
In Segalla’s The Diary Project (2023 – present) she has created over 120 digital illustrations (A4 and A3) documenting the clothes she is wearing every day when she leaves her house.
“My body, my drawings – they are my language. My work doesn’t need to speak – IT IS the speaking!”, she has explained.
In 8/12/24 (100 GBP) we see Segalla in a decidedly Vivienne Westwood outfit accentuated in the painterly digital drawing. Wearing a Westwood-style outsize tartan cape, a flowing pink chiffon scarf, red leggings, with red ‘can’ headphones, and holding in her outstretched right hand an opened flip-phone. In this image she portrays herself as an icon, a muse, and perhaps an ‘influencer’.
Segalla’s myriad changes of exotic costumes bring to mind the performance artist and celebrated icon himself, Daniel Lismore. And before him, the flamboyant Leigh Bowery, whose life is the subject of a retrospective right now at Tate Modern. In many of her ‘poses’ Segalla looks almost doll-like, and behind each digital drawing there are handwritten quotations or poems, all in Russian. She has spoken often of her vulnerability and of being an immigrant, and I suspect that she misses Russia a lot. Recently, she did return to Moscow to work on some new projects.
But now they’re near. Before them glisteningAlready white-stoned Moscow runs,Like fire, with golden crosses quivering,Its ancient domes gleam in the sun.
Oh brothers! How my heart was happyTo see the churches, bell-towers clanging,
The gardens, courtyards, crescents’ sweepBefore me opened suddenly!
— Alexander Pushkin, 1826
Sofia Segalla has deservedly already won several awards, including the “Emerging Virtuoso Prize” given by the Lumen Art Gallery in their Drop the Light exhibition, and been published in numerous international magazines.
“Drawing. Dressing. Not quite speaking. Not quite silent.” A fitting quote from Segalla to end on. I greatly look forward to following her exciting and unique career!
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
— William Shakespeare
