ABOUT ME
VERA
REINER
Vera was born in the permafrost of Yakutia and grew up dreaming of becoming a saint. The Christianity of her childhood was very twisted: she was certain computers carried the number of the beast, 666, and you couldn't touch them if you didn't want to surrender yourself to Satan. God was not kind — he could save a falling plane by sending angels, or curse you if you failed to show proper respect
The world around her had very fixed rules: women must cook,
men do not, certain nations are better than others, and some countries
are the enemy.
Even then, Vera knew something around her was wrong and argued with all of it, the way a child argues: with words that weren't enough, against adults who didn't listen. And Vera dreamed up stories that got her called a liar, and she drew. From as early as she can remember, this was how she imagined a different world, the one she knew existed somewhere beyond what surrounded her
And at the first opportunity,
she left for the Great Unknown
She became a journalist, and from that small town she found herself in big cities, traveling widely. The turning point was her first ever trip to Paris, a city full of people from cultures and lives she had never imagined.
Leaving, she watched through the bus window
at people so different from anything she
had known, and wept.
And Vera finally had the words
Working for major publications, she wrote about fashion, art, and their influence on the world we live in. And she kept drawing — but kept hearing that her black-and-white work wasn't contemporary art but illustration. That she should approach publishers instead to illustrate books written by somebody else
She discovered that words alone require
a single conclusion and the world
she wanted to build was bigger than that.
Art became her main language — because it opens into many interpretations
Then her country fell into dictatorship and Vera left again. She works now in ink, ceramics, performance, building worlds where collective traumas are mythologized, where nothing is allowed to be lost, where every detail carries meaning but every viewer assembles a different picture. The same world she started building as a child, before she had a name for what she was doing.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
