Polina (Tereshina) Bertou 
Bio/CV | Website | #polinatereshina

EXHIBITIONS
upcoming
Polina Bertou and Jess Perlitz: zero percent contained
November 9 - December 21, 2024
studio e gallery, Seattle, WA

past
Seattle Art Fair, 2024
Tokico  
Seattle Art Fair, 2023
2 Gather, Sept, 2021, studio e gallery, Seattle, WA
A Gathering, 2021 The Catskills, NYC, NY
Flesh and Time and Bread and Freinds, 2021, Christine Mayer Gallery, Munich, Germany
In The Wake, Hunter College Gallery, NY
Leyline of Anticipation, 2020, Puppy American, Bronx NY 
1 Room, 2018, studio e gallery, Seattle, WA
Out of Sight, 2017, Jackson Street, Seattle, WA 

Visually informed by a variety of cultural references encompassing the language of cartooning, painting history, and literature, these works play with a combination of familiar images, scale shifts, and visual and linguistic tropes. Sharp lines live next to loose, expressive brush strokes, chaotic drips, and liquid stains, making the works feel simultaneously like drawings and paintings, equally graphic and abstracted.

A cast of enigmatic characters in Bertou’s work, figures of humans and animals painted with urgency and speed, peer out of evocative limbos. Stylistically direct, the figures emote vulnerability, anxiety, longing, and other less nameable emotions through subtle gestures and facial expressions.
The horse is a recurring character in this arrangement of paintings, alluding to the pervasive albeit contradictory ideas of heroism, agency, conquest, possession, and freedom associated with its image. Works such as smoke and fire for example, play with these ideas—an image of an anthropomorphized rocking horse situated in a hazy non-space breaks down the power and ubiquity of the canonical image with tongue-in-cheek irreverence.

By often painting with bubblegum pinks and stinging neons, Bertou lures the viewer into confronting serious topics through a sense of play. She renders familiar images absurd, presenting an array of humanity that vacillates between hope and despair.