Althuis Hofland is pleased to present Cabinet pictures, the second solo exhibition of the artist with the gallery, opening on June 6 from 17:00 - 19:00.

Each of our worlds begin at home­­ ––whatever that exactly means to anyone. Perhaps mostly a feeling. Beyond this space our stories spill into the shared infrastructure that makes up life all around. A series of exchanges take place and connect our world with the world, inside with outside, us with each other.

In Cabinet pictures Polina Barskaya shares vignettes of her world, her family’s world and where those permeate into other places they move through, in ten small scale paintings. The moments depicted are as instantaneous as they are intimate, extracted from the daily routines such as waking up, having breakfast, looking at art, or being at home––not typical highlights singled out to remember as in photographs, but rather as though stills from a film that might otherwise pass by were it not for Barskaya noting and then pointing us to their beauty. In giving these trivial moments a platform but captured at such a small scale the paintings turn almost theatrical.

In each portrait, windows (or, like windows, Rothko’s color fields) or the light falling through them frame the artist and her family, guiding us to look longer. And, in looking we are brought close to the artist: to such proximity that we look at Barskaya’s life through her eyes, but perhaps seeing more and more of ourselves as we do. Through the fixation of a fleeting moment without precedent of successive information, (the instant is all we get) the mood and emotions take an equal role as protagonists in these family portraits. Like a sole sentence from a diary, standing on its own, the personal scenes–not meant to be seen by anyone else than its participants–and the feeling imbued in them become recognizable, universal even.

In its real and stillness Cabinet pictures is a curious presentation of moment memories. Through the vulnerability and joy of painting Barskaya lets her world seep into ours, reinforcing appreciation of the invisible moments that make up life, and reminding us that sometimes it is in these smallest spaces that one can dream furthest.