Ella Kruglyanskaya: Too Much

An epistolary-style artist’s book offering meditations on womanhood and acts of creation

Latvian–born, New York–based artist Ella Kruglyanskaya (born 1978) paints kinetic vignettes, often featuring exaggerated, nearly caricatured depictions of the female body. Kruglyanskaya’s practice intends to engage with the historical tropes of Western painting in regard to the female figure and to update these conventions.
Too Much presents Kruglyanskaya’s latest series, created over the last four years. In some ways, the volume responds directly to the loneliness induced by Covid. The artist pens over a dozen letters to the reader, dispersing them among her paintings. Intimate, meditative and darkly humorous, the letters grapple with themes such as the depiction of gender and motherhood, the process of artistic output and the act of writing itself. A text by essayist Alissa Bennett—author of the zine Dead Is Better and cohost of The C-Word podcast with Lena Dunham—offers an entryway into Kruglyanskaya’s graphic figures and expertly rendered still lifes.