Bio
The artist
The constant in K. Lious’s practice, which spans printmaking, ceramics, watercolour, painting on canvas and installation, is the line, drawn in a single pass that admits no correction. In her paintings she traces it with the brush, yet from a distance the image reads as a print. The paint is acrylic, a modern material chosen over oil for ancient iconographies. She began painting on canvas in Paris, where eighteen months of study in the city’s museums gave form to her fields of colour.
Her figurative vocabulary draws on repertoires with a long afterlife, passed through centuries and many hands. Among them are the grotesques of the Domus Aurea, taken up in the Renaissance by Raphael and the Flemish masters; engraved carnelian gems from Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Sumerian traditions, often set as symbolic jewellery; illuminated manuscripts; and the herbals and alchemical treatises of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in which botanical illustration moves between the observation of nature and mystical interpretation. Her relationship to these sources is one of sedimentation. She quotes them by instinct, as they resurface from a visual memory that has already metabolised them.
Of Tatar origin, she works in Rome, the city where the grotesque re-emerged at the end of the fifteenth century. She is also drawn to symmetry as quantum mechanics defines it, as a principle of invariance, and her work refers to it implicitly.
Photo: Fred De Casablanca, Paris, 2026
Texts & Press
Fabio Sindici, ‘Utopie elettriche’, text for the exhibition Utopie Elettriche, Notizie in Controluce, 31 March 2016
‘Le pagine miniate della contemporaneità. A Roma’, Artribune, April 2016
Paolo Aita, catalogue text for Memorie della Terra, La Nube di Oort, Rome, 2006
Contact
K. Lious
Rome, Italy