VALERIE SAVCHITS was born to a Russian-speaking family near the Baltic Sea in Latvia in 1993. She graduated from the University of Salford in 2016 with a degree in Visual Arts. Artist's work mainly explores ideas of identity and reversed aesthetics as well as issues and struggles of the post-soviet generation. Guided by the dada, trans avant-garde and neo-expressionist movements, she adds imperfections to her paintings and intentionally destroys generally accepted views and norms.

Valerie uses different art media - from oil paintings and graffiti to neon installations and spray painted sculptures. Savchits exhibits nationally and internationally working from her studio in Hotel Elephant Studios & Gallery in Southwark, London. Her work appeared in Tate Modern, Saatchi Gallery, Affordable Art Fair UK, The Guardian, BBC Live and Uniqlo on 311 Oxford St. She has also been published digitally in several art magazines such as The Skulls Co. (2015), FreshPaintMagazine (2016) and Sukeban Gang (2016).

I was born in 1993 and raised in a post-soviet society where I learned to appreciate the official notion of beauty and how to strive for harmony. Under the communist regime, any disproportionality or deviation from established norms within existing ideologies in our community was absolutely unacceptable and subsequently did not fit into the overall picture of the world. In order to show a growing discontent to this matter I have chosen in my recent work to explore and reveal: how aesthetics can be made to move in the opposite direction from the norms and eventually become a ‘reversed aesthetics’ or, in other words, how to unsee that fake beauty and immerse yourself into harsh and ugly reality without pretense, rejecting aesthetic norms. It strikes me that one of the key problems for acknowledging ‘reversed aesthetics’ as a relevant standard of today’s art is inability to involve our subjectivity and personal attitudes in order to understand it. My concern is that turning away from established norms should not be ignored anymore as the whole process reflects the truth of a large portion of the population and gives a chance to leave prejudices of the past behind us. My recent works such as ‘Lola’, ‘Mona’, ‘War and Peace’ (2016) explore different issues of being in the center of ethnographic multiculturalism, ideas of identity and reversed aesthetics as well as issues and struggles of the post-soviet generation.

Figurative art enables me to engage with symbolism in the same way as abstract art engages with intense subjectivity. Also I use a very limited colour palette which helps me to focus on the message that I am aiming to deliver to the audience. In my work pink is the main colour which represents happiness, innocence, femininity and has unavoidable impact on today's society and while working with different media my idea is to destroy aesthetically beautiful and replace it with ugly, using this colour as a tool to control and manipulate. I studied work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Marlene Dumas, Edouard Manet, Francis Bacon, Cy Twombly, Tracey Emin, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, as well as Russian writers and poets such as Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Their work articulates the spirit of freedom that I always craved for. Straight after graduating with a first class honours in Visual Arts from University of Salford you could see my work in Tate Modern, Saatchi Gallery, Affordable Art Fair UK, The Guardian, BBC Live and Uniqlo on Oxford St.