Anastasia LopoukhineDeath cannot exist without life

Anastasia Lopoukhine works across pen and ink, charcoal drawing and collage. Often drawing from memory, her works depict characters from her childhood, which function as prompts to help her recall the funny, grotesque and strange nature of everyday encounters. 

This piece is inspired by the work of Vladimir Nabokov, who was an enthusiastic collector of butterflies. Nabokov had a very dutiful wife who used to stand by the side of the field with a gun to protect her husband as he ran around in shorts collecting butterflies with a net. Lopoukhine was particularly inspired by the Nabokov memoir entitled Speak, Memory which begins with the line "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The short life span of butterflies means that we experience them in their limited time between life and death, but in this drawing they are immortalised forever. 

Framed.