Veronika Bezdenejnykh
Tiger Tear
2026
€800,00
Varnished watercolour on 250 gr paper mounted on poplar plywood, acrylics
23 x 14 x 2 cm
Unique painting in a series of ten variations
In stock
about this work
Veronika Bezdenejnykh’s Tiger Tears are a series of paintings that developed out of her Museumplein flags. The digital collages that formed the basis of the flags, with their layered mix of decorative patterns, street details and historical references, serve here as the starting point for a more intimate, painted exploration.
The tiger motif from Images from Home originally came from a kitsch interior shop on the Wondelgemstraat, but is at the same time a figure deeply rooted in the Central Asian decorative traditions Bezdenejnykh frequently draws on. The watercolours on tear-shaped wood give the tiger a bitter edge: the animal mourns what it has itself devoured. It is an image that evokes both strength and sorrow, and could be read as a commentary on processes of migration, displacement and the way cultures are absorbed or erased. But as always in Bezdenejnykh’s work meaning is not fixed, it moves with whoever is looking.
about Veronika Bezdenejnykh
Veronika Bezdenejnykh’s practice moves between painting and spatial installation — works that feel like environments you step into rather than objects you look at, and that she describes as a ‘transformation box’: a space where meaning is not fixed, but open to whoever stands in front of it.
Her canvases are built up from small, carefully placed brushstrokes that produce soft colour gradations, like light shifting across a tiled wall. The references she draws on are wide and unhierarchical — Persian carpets, Byzantine mosaics, wallpaper patterns, the shimmer of pearls in Van Eyck’s paintings — sourced from grainy book reproductions and online archives, and transformed through the distortions that copying and repainting inevitably introduce. What interests her is what happens to an image when it travels through time: how meaning fades, shifts, and opens up into something new.
Veronika Bezdenejnykh has exhibited at Geukens & De Vil, Antwerp; Pizza Gallery, Ghent; and CIAP, Hasselt, and participated in the large-scale public art project Finis Terrae. Her work is currently on view in front of S.M.A.K. Ghent as part of our series Museumplein.
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