CV and Biography - Gallery Elena Shchukina

gallery
elena
shchukina
Katusha Bull
Katusha Ostroumoff Bull (b.1951) was born in Hong Kong where she lived until the age of
19, when she moved to Australia to study nursing. In 1998 she moved to the UK and
studied portraiture and figurative sculpture at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art, Chelsea,
and she has been working as a sculptor full time since graduating in 2002.
Her creative achievements were formally recognised in 2005, when she was made an
Associate of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. Recently, Bull was elected a member of
the Society of Designer Craftsmen. Her work can be found in many collections in the UK,
USA, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Norway and India.
Katusha Bull creates sculpture to live with. Each piece best rewards those who commit to a
close, ongoing relationship with it, observing it on a day-to-day basis. Only then can a
viewer fully understand how her works change with the endlessly changing lights of
different times of day, seasons and even locations, creating subtly shifting aesthetic and
emotional effects on a personal, intimate scale.
Being so purely abstract, her art is open for all to enjoy. Each piece means nothing less, and
nothing more, than what it is. She makes no exclusive cultural or philosophical references,
and requires no specialist sculptural knowledge of her audience. Rather, each work explores
the directly present formal properties of the individual stone being worked on, and of the
wider visual world that we all live in.
Those formal properties are brought out in stone through Bull’s uniquely iconoclastic
carving style. Her sculptural training and experience has helped her become both a
confident reinventor of existing techniques, and a bold explorer of new ways of working. At
the moment, she works mostly with alabaster, but has also worked in marble, calcite and
onyx. Her suppliers know her work well, and select stones that they know she will find
inspiring from a variety of worldwide sources.
Her aesthetic is defined in particular by her fascination with the endlessly paradoxical
Möbius loop, and related natural curls, twists and waves. This fascination stems from a
deep awareness of, and sensitivity to, the constant flow of the natural world in general. Her
sculptures embody this endless, universal movement, and – by capturing it on such an
intimate scale – help those of us lucky enough to live with them both understand, and
explore, its perpetual presence in us all.
Selected Recent Exhibitions:
2015 Masterpiece Art Fair, Royal Hospital Chelsea, London
2014 ‘Buy or Bid Sale,’ Christie’s South Kensington, London
2014 ‘Works from the 70s and 80s,’ Gallery Elena Shchukina, London
2014 ‘On Form’ Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire
2014 ‘Autumn Bliss,’ Gallery Elena Shchukina, London
2013 Parallax Art Fair, Chelsea Town Hall
2013 ‘On Form,’ St Pancras Church and Crypt, London
2012 ‘On Form,’ Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire
2012 Royal College of Art
2011 Affordable Art Fair Battersea, London
2011 Art London, Chelsea, London
2011 Christie’s, solo exhibition, South Kensington
2011 20/21 International Art Fair, RCA London
2010 20/21 International Art Fair, RCA, London
2009 Thompson’s Gallery, solo exhibition, London
2009 RHS Chelsea Flower Show, London
2009 ‘Artists of Fame & Promise,’ Beaux Arts Bath, Somerset
2008 Newby Hall Contemporary Sculpture Show, Yorkshire
10 Lees Place
Mayfair
London W1K 6LL
+44 (0)20 7499 6019
[email protected]
galleryelenashchukina.com