Tania Rivilis Artist

Welcome to the official Tania Rivilis website,
where you can learn more about the artist and get the artwork you love from the studio right to your home.

The William Lock Portrait Prize 2022 for the most timeless portrait
with a real feeling for paint and its aesthetic potential.

Represented by the Galerie Bonnard, Netherlands (press here) ,
Arcadia Contemporary NYC (for more info mail info@arcadiacontemporary.com)

Artworks also can be purchased here:
ARTSY
1STDIBS.com

Upcoming exhibition

Naarden the Art Fair
Represented by Bonnard Galerie
26 – 29 January 2023

Grote Kerk Naarden
Marktstraat 13 | 1411 CX Naarden

Episode 223 – Tania Rivilis UNCUT

John Dalton´s Podcast
(listen here) or John Dalton´s podcast on Spotify (press here)

“Today I had the great fortune of discovering the wonderful work of the Russian-German artist Tania Rivilis. It is an art that from the very first moment captivates, both for its content, its technique, its composition, and its color. This is an artist who any connoisseur immediately notices has studied the great masters of the past, such as Michaelangelo, Caravaggio, Dürer, Titian, and Rubens; but also to more recent luminaries such as Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Lucian Freud and many others.
Currently, Rivilis, who lives and works in Germany, is participating in a collective show in New York, at Arcadia Gallery, with artists like my dear friend Joshua Flint. The theme of the exhibition is The Male of the Species. The majority of the works presented in this collective by Rivilis show men in a homoerotic, sensual, and androgynous way. Other artists, such as Josh Flint, sees man in a much more traditional way: virile and athletic.

All those views are valid, because being a man encompasses all types of behavior and identifications. Apart from that art, high culture, and intelligence know no prejudice.
This is art for cultured, refined, and sophisticated people. Those hands–so beautiful–remind one of the beautiful hands of a Michaelangelo, of a Leonardo, and of the Renaissance, Baroque, and post-impressionist masters…!
Certainly, I will buy, in due course, works by this artist for my pampered collection.

These are the things no one, no one imagines, I miss from being in Boston. However, the fact that I am here in Panama, living a very simple life, does not mean that I have abandoned what I am passionate about.. I am simply enriching my life, in my own roots, with other wonderful and necessary life experiences.”

Ibis Sanchez-Serrano
Scientist, Global Health Care Expert, Art Historian, Writer

Tonight, let’s share thoughts about Tania Rivilis ‘work.

Tania returns to the old project of portraiture, its oldest dream: to transform a real person into a figure that captures its presence. Today, it has become difficult to say it out loud without giggling. But she takes each of her portraits seriously with a rigour that is almost anachronistic In modern art, it is often said (I am caricaturing) that the portrait is a place of temporary academism – the « youth » of a painter – or of experimentation and diversion – painters prove their virtuosity by desecrating or deconstructing the portrait as a genre.

More rarely, the portrait is an end in itself: to represent someone, their form, their singular way of being. Tania Rivilis ‘s portraits do not cheat. They are neither an exercise in style nor a pretext to prove the originality of an aesthetic sensibility.

She is determined to inhabit the portrait and to deploy her art there without any irony. Any portrait stands on a point of balance between idolatry that threatens to destroy painter’s art and artist’s aggressiveness that disfigures what they give figure to. On the one hand, the enigmatic presence of the model silences the powers of painting; on the other hand, the form of the model dislocates itself under the ferocious assaults of the painter. Portraiture is a dangerous business. Great painters are people who know how to take and how to give back what they have taken. Sorry for these nocturnal generalities.

Let’s look at Tania’s portraits.

After long moments of wandering among them, I have some simple impressions. I leave them to their mess – as they come back to me as I write this review. Tania prefers duets. Not only because she paints a lot of duets, but because each of her characters – even when alone – is haunted by the presence of another who is not there. Tania prefers two to one, and she knows how to find duality in all her subjects. What Tania paints is not an individual as an autonomous or independent entity, it’s the reality of a link or an attachment between two beings. It’s something concrete. It’s not the idea or concept of a bond (mother/son; lovers; friends; etc.), it’s the flesh of a relationship. It is the uncountable sum of gestures which make that a being tends towards another. There is, in the painting of Tania, omnipresence of the tact and the contact. Characters touch each other and themselves when they are alone. It is first of all by the sense of touch – so difficult to represent in painting – that a relationship can be created. They look at each other with their whole body – this gives them a radiance or shimmer of their own. Look at Tania’s characters hands: exaggeratedly large, so expressive that they are almost in the center of paintings. Hands have or perhaps are a face.

Hands that caress, grasp, touch, point, press. It’s not uncommon for the texture of the skin to change a little on the surface of the hands – as if these hands belonged to someone else. Hands are active but characters are idle: hands are busy while the bodies are available, left to themselves, waiting for an event, etc. They are hands freed from work – from production, from manufacturing. They are returned to their essential property: touching and signing. It is from these useless or unusable hands that what I would like to call a queer sensuality can emerge. And these characters are not just anywhere: what Tania depicts are metropolitan bodies that have come together.

Backgrounds are often vague & blurred, but few « realistic » details place us in lair of any contemporary city: a smartphone, a haircut, a cardboard coffee cup, etc. But this historical or sociological “concreteness” is sometimes coupled with a floral presence that smells a little old – a step towards kitsch that assumes the fantasy at work in the representation of a model. We could add that the extreme modernity of these portraits and that they have integrated the aesthetic codes of the selfie: framing, posture, look, head carriage, etc. It is, as I say, a return to the old, beautiful ambition of the portrait – to show the soul of an individual – but partly filtered by the norms of the Instagram image that she appropriates in a playful way. The beauty of these duets is that they represent a relationship between equals. Tania pays attention to both what is given and what is received. She highlights nuances that thwart stereotypes and false identities – but without putting her painting at the service of an ideology. Actually, I find in Tania’s painting a frontal refusal of abstraction or theorization. What interests her is a warmth, an energy, an embodied connection that cannot be captured under this or that category of social life. To do this, she combines color work bordering on Fauvism, borrows from Mannerism for its bizarre distortion of the human form, and brings each portrait to a level of intensity or incandescence that comes from an expressionist approach to painting.

But who cares?

P.S.: all

Tania Rivilis’s characters have light eyes, even when their eyes are black or closed.

Professore Jun
Art/Nft anatomist of The House of Medici

ARCADIA gallery
NEW YORK
“Male of the Species”

International Invitational
June 19 – July 11, 2021

For more information – > info@arcadiacontemporary.com

“Years ago when the hubs and I bought our EPA-condemned shack in the mountains, we gutted the entire interior – dodged a few rat carcasses careening from the rafters – and got intimately familiar with every nook and cranny of Home Depot.
That’s how I know that the OSB ‘canvas’ that Russian-German contemporary artist @tania_rivilis uses for her sublime portraits (like this one!) is also known as oriented strandboard.
Any self-respecting lady should NOT know that term, but I digress. (It was a dark period in my life heh heh. I also know how to wire electrical outlets, grout tile, and a lot of other DIY contractor-y things that I hope to never ever ever draw upon again from my vast house building skillset.)
But TANIA is **really** the star of this show. First of all, I always leap for joy when I see portraits of men, period. Sure, women are lovely but there are way too many feminine visages clogging up Instagram.
This gorgeous take on male portraiture seems sooo ravishingly poetic. And her palette makes me want to say LORDY LORDY HALLELUJAH AMEN (I’m not even 1% religious!).
But back to the OSB that Tania uses for her canvas. Basically, it’s made of tightly bonded wood chips. Lots o’ texture.
That’s why Tania’s portraiture – which is already so skillfully executed – looks extra special. In a way, she’s made the wood bend to her will!
I wanted to share 5 of her male portraits since they are all quite excellent, but I don’t want to waste them due to the speed-scrolling tendency of this platform.
So…I will meter them out over time like excellent quality chocolate. (Who am I kidding? I plow through chocky every chance I get… life’s too short to savor it for a rainy day!”
Elizah Leigh
𝐒𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐫 & 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐟𝐟 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫
for @beautifulbizarremagazine

The Guide Artists Magazine. Interview with Tania Rivilis

WINTER – SPRING 2021 | MARCH (press here)
or read my interview online (press here)

Interview for PURPLEHAZE Magazine (press here)

The William Lock Portrait Prize 2022 for the most timeless portrait with a real feeling for paint and its aesthetic potential.

Upcoming exhibition

Episode 223 – Tania Rivilis UNCUT

The William Lock Portrait Prize 2022 for the most timeless portrait
with a real feeling for paint and its aesthetic potential.