Olga Niki

Olga Nikiforova, self-taught collage artist from Uzbekistan currently living in Cameroon. French teacher and psychologist by trade, born and raised in Tashkent. 47 year old. 12 years ago she started moving around the world with her family. With her husband and three children they lived in Kyrgyzstan, Laos, the Solomon Islands and Cameroon. Travelling around the world has left a deep mark on her life and has literally pushed her to become creative. She got access to different cultural layers rich in traditions and history, the hitherto unknown side of the life of so many people. Creativity helped not to lose herself amidst everything happening around her. On the contrary, it has brought the artist closer to herself and allowed to feel what really matters. Collage became a tool that allows her to tell the stories that she needed to tell most vividly.

Olga Niki makes her art in analog collage technique. In her work she explores psychological and social aspects of human life such as loneliness, inner limitations, the search for self, and how external events influence changes in a person’s inner ecosystem. Often, these are spontaneous, intuitive compositions, where the artist does not follow her conception but rather the artwork is being born following its own internal logic, where the author only follows the direction of the lines and the development of the plot, adhering to basic compositional and coloristic rules. These collages best reflect the artist’s inner state and bring to the surface feelings and experiences that are sometimes invisible in everyday life. In her work Olga tries to demonstrate everything that she loves in collage technique. The subtle play of lines, angles, meanings, a hint of provocation, the juxtaposition of spaces. When the obvious becomes quite unobvious. Where logic suggests a continuation of something familiar and predictable, there is a new meaning, an unexpected twist.