The city wakes up under a wave of infernal heat that melts both the sidewalks and the inhabitants who circulate on them. The few passers-by who cross (Nina Koltchitskaia, one of them) Calle Fernando VI, an always lively thoroughfare called ‘Upper Chueca’ for its cafes, plant shops and designer boutiques, beat the heat as best they can.
Nina Koltchitskaia Paintings
The window of the Sessun store, on the other hand, decorated by a cascade of violent magenta flowers and lemons, visually cools the urban landscape; The painting of the drawing that its author, Nina Koltchitskaia , drew freehand a few hours ago, still remains fresh.
The day before, the artist and photographer heroically endured the mantle of degrees on her petite silhouette. The reason for her visit to the capital was to devise a typically Mediterranean garden that would welcome the capsule collection designed in collaboration with the French brand.
A total of 18 unpublished garments that perfectly contain the universe that surrounds Nina Koltchitskaia followed every day by more than 106,000 people on Instagram and symbolizes what fashion is for her, a close link between her person and the world that surrounds you.
“I think of clothes as trips; they are the most intimate contact we have with the skin, a window between intimacy and the outside world. In addition, they hide many powers: they can be at the same time a protective shield, a way of expressing yourself, a game, a work of art, a weapon of seduction, a political statement or simply a comfortable cloud in which to feel good”, he explains to a Fashion Magazine before the inauguration.
About Nina Koltchitskaia
Poetic in speech and in every gesture, Nina Koltchitskaia (Moscow, 1987) is part of a generation of women who eclipses social networks with her style, that evolution of the it girl that Chloe Sevigny and Kate Moss devised in the nineties and that London faces like Alexa Chung or the Geldof sisters perpetuated in the 2000s.
Her way of describing the inspiration that surrounds the collection reveals that ability that is as ethereal as it is forceful of which her friend Jeanne Damas is a master, with whom she collaborated on the design of artisanal ceramics for solidarity purposes for its Rouje brand to make small things a statement of intent.
“I love to dance and imagine myself [in these clothes] on the seashore, in a small fishing village in Italy or in a stream. I see myself immersing myself in the sun-kissed water, savoring the salt and acid perfume of a lemon on my skin while wearing the white Italie dress ”, she confesses.
Tuned in Paris but always feeling Italy closely “it is the country of my heart”, she declares Nina Koltchitskaia has continued that nomadic and free spirit that characterizes a lineage of several generations of artists. The first ten years of her life were spent in the Russian capital, in a family where creative language was as organic and natural as learning to walk or pronounce the first words. Both parents worked in the film industry and had a hobby of painting that inadvertently became an inherent part of Nina’s childhood.
“I grew up surrounded by brushes everywhere, colored pencils, ink, canvas. I remember that I loved looking at them, as if they were relics. All these tools seemed like magic wands to me, and the canvases, windows open to the impossible. How magical is that for a girl?
After spending long periods in Vietnam, Laos and Milan, Nina would move to Paris to study literature and philosophy at the University of La Soborna. Meanwhile, she wanted to put all her energies into photography, that old hobby of her grandfather, occasional photographer and tireless traveler of hers.
“He gave me a wonderful camera that he used to take on all his trips and I used it from a very young age. I was always afraid of forgetting things, that’s why it became (and still is) my magic tool to remember everything. Photography is capable of creating a very subtle and intimate union between the object and the eye itself; a bond between two souls that captures invisible feelings forever”.
Nina’s Journey
While the first individual exhibitions Love me Tender (2010) and Amazon (2012) arrived at the ICART photography school in Paris, Nina approached painting in a natural but hesitant way. “She had always painted but for me, in secret. The boxes of watercolors and the tubes of oil paint were one more in my house; my older sister studied at the Russian Academy of Fine Arts, my father painted a lot and later my mother did. So I always wanted to color what I saw, but at first I wasn’t too confident, so I went for photography first.”
But her pictorial heritage ended up prevailing and she began to sketch her first drawings. It was Olivier Coursier(Bretigny-sur-Orge, 1974), her future husband, who encouraged her works to see the light of day in the project of poetic drawings Left handed lovers , which started in 2016.
Together with the producer and member of the musical duo Aaron, Nina has starred in one of those love stories that seem to follow the script of a movie. They met almost by chance as a result of a job “when we said goodbye that day it began to snow”, he declared to the French edition of Vogue, he asked her to marry him on top of a mountain on the Greek island of Amorgos and they closed the circle in 2019 with the most famous wedding of the year.
A triple ceremony with the Sahara desert as a stage surrounded by socialites and a wardrobe by Isabel Marant, Valentino and Simone Rocha in which she lavished good taste in abundance. That same year, her work would travel to international art fairs such as YIA Art Fair in Paris and ARTLife in Moscow.
During the pandemic, on the other hand, Nina experienced a creative pause that she remembers with some bitterness: “At first it was difficult to find time for myself during confinement. I felt short of breath, but my friends helped me see the beauty of it all again.” As a result, 50 of her works are part of the Romantic Days exhibition that is being held these days and until November at the Daelim Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul.
With intellectuals such as Cocteau or Bachelard as referents of her work, for Nina the true inspiration lies in simple and everyday things. “With painting I feel as if I were taking a journey through dreams and feelings, and they manifest themselves on a canvas or paper with colored shapes.”
When it comes to creating, hobbies prevail in her workshop, such as the need to be alone, to paint barefoot or to surround herself with small objects that she adores: “Flowers, shells that I have found on the beach, little boxes with phrases of love, a lemon, some peas, postcards from magical lands, books of poetry And music”.
The result is a canvas of sunny meadows, nurtured by fleshy roses and carnations, cerulean skies, and ripe lemons. A journey through the landscapes of his life that somehow emerge in his brushwork, and also in this collection of an artisanal nature in the form of garments and accessories with patchwork, crochet and lace work. “I wanted this collection to be honest and sincere, like summer. Both the Sessun team and I wanted to create something that could bring our worlds together, make us dream and travel through it.”
Nina’s next adventure place
With Spain as the designated place for his next summer adventure, he concludes that nature, in its purest form, is one of his great obsessions. “When I’m in it, huge things happen. I feel that it protects me from everything false, from darkness, from sadness, from fear. Flowers, skies, sea, light. They are poems for the eyes, for the skin, for the ears. They make life great, tender and beautiful at the same time, worth dancing every day.
