Kazakova’s ‘In Spite of Our Fears’ exhibit includes powerful images of grief and transformation

This painting, in Tatyana Kazakova’s “In the Box” series, can be seen at The Grover House Gallery in Caldwell.

In 2023, the painter Tatyana Kazakova lost her son. He was 32 years old. Devastation drove her to perform acts of unflinching honesty. Her “Grief” series — filled with small portraits of mothers and children, whitespace cut out of bodies, handprints and arched backs, splayed fingers and empty palms, and the body language of mourning, desperate entreaties, and hopes for rebirth — is an unsparing representation of what it feels like to forever lose a loved one.

It can be hard to look at. But once you are caught in the orbit of this powerful project, it is tough to pull away. Kazakova understands the key to fascinating her audience. Nothing, it turns out, is more magnetic than the truth.

The intensity of the “Grief” series is not new for this artist. Kazakova deals in feelings that are too big to fit easily into frames. In many of her works, human figures are crouched, doubled over and mirrored, bent, pinched, and butting up against the edges of the canvases. They are growing beyond control, slipping out of the painter’s field of vision, shedding skin and generating friction. These pictures want to molt.

“In Spite of Our Fears” — a gutsy, roaring, relentless retrospective that fills the walls of all three floors of The Grover House in Caldwell — dares viewers to be fully present to their emotions. Even difficult emotions. Kazakova draws from the visual language of nature to register her observations about a world in flux: one in which the only constant is change. As she knows as well as anybody, that is terrifying. It is also invigorating, and this show is a portrait of a painter brilliantly, defiantly, improbably alive.

Curator Cheryl Minden divides the show into thirds, dedicating each floor of The Grover House to different collections of related works. Kazakova is a painter who thinks in series, so it is logical to group her pieces according to their common elements. Minden’s decision allows the visitor to see ideas develop across related canvases, and it gives us a look into how the artist disciplines her volcanic emotions.

It is not, however, strictly necessary. The thematic content in “In Spite of Our Fears” is never obscured: it is right there in every picture, and it will follow you from floor to floor like a stray dog, and probably out onto Bloomfield Avenue. When a show is as coherent as this, no matter how the deck is shuffled, there is no wrong way to deal the cards.

“Transformation: Inner Growth,” by Tatyana Kazakova.

The show reaches the peak of its communicative power on the second floor. There, right in your face the very moment you get out of the elevator, is “Transformation: Inner Growth,” the quintessential Kazakova piece, and a work of great balance, implied motion, mystery and physicality.

At first glance, the acrylic painting on plywood is hard to riddle out. It certainly looks exciting, and maybe a little disturbing, but it is not immediately clear whether we are looking at one angled body, two bodies, or no bodies at all. A dark brown figure is conjoined at the waist with a beige one. They appear to be grappling with each other. If either one stood upright, its head would burst straight through the top of the frame. Instead, these figures are folded together, brutally, at right angles. Inside a tidy square frame, they form a small square of their own — a closed system, organic and airtight.

Like much of Kazakova’s work, the scene is marvelously uncomfortable. Something here is struggling to become: to burst through the parameters set for it and uncoil like a tensed spring. We feel the contraction, the confinement, the absence of atmosphere, and the fierce will to transcend limitations.

Though it is possible to see “Transformation: Inner Growth” as a fight between two forces, it is more complicated than that. One of these figures is sloughing off the other in the way that a maturing cicada slips from its shell. It is peeling away an old body and emerging as something new. Maybe it will be monstrous; maybe it will be glorious; maybe it will be both. The important thing is that the subject of the painting is forever altered — and Kazakova has recorded the mixture of pain, confusion and exhilaration that always accompanies renewal.

Tatyana Kazakova and her “Loss and Survival.”

Straight across the second floor of Grover House, we see similar images: bodies pitched at impossible angles with long, slender arms and digits crinkled like the tines of an old rake, hunched backs, and heads shielded from view as if they are emerging from the darkness of the chrysalis and ducking from the blast of sunshine. Often they are marked as female by small but noticeable breasts.

Kazakova underscores the connection to natural metamorphosis by applying paint in thick, grainy layers, allowing it to build up until it achieves the texture of a cocoon. In the midst of these color fields, the painter raises lines, slim as fishbones, fragile but unbroken, steeling these bodies against the torment they face. These are something like a skeletal system, something like the veins of a leaf, and something like the stems of dried roses.

These figures reoccur in smaller, flatter form in a first floor series that amplifies the feeling of restriction in the “Transformation” pieces. Kazakova’s “In the Box” paintings on paper feature her bent female humans pressed up against the corners of the frames. They have scant latitude for motion, and their heads are tucked so dramatically into their bodies, to conserve space, that a person could get a neckache just thinking about them.

Their understatement is a striking contrast to the towering vertical mixed-media pieces directly across the corridor — like “Chaos & Nature: A Fleeting Moment in the Ferns,” a disorienting cascade of autumn-leaf crimson, flame orange, bright white structures that resemble rib cages, and vigorous black lines like sutures holding it all together. These larger paintings look like they are about to burst and spill pigment all over the floor. The “In the Box” characters aren’t springing themselves free quite so easily. They don’t look imprisoned. Tucked into square wombs, they are gestating.

We root for them to be born. We want them to be released from captivity, stretch out and become who they were meant to be. Yet they will be emerging into an inhospitable realm: one where even the plants, greedy for growth and space as all healthy living things are, come armed with spikes, sawteeth, and leaves like sabres. Kazakova’s large-scale watercolor depictions of fauna certainly mean business, and it is meaningful that many of the images of flowers and seedpods in “In Spite of Our Fears” are bigger and far more imposing than the images of human beings. Nature will call the tune and we will jump to it, the painter seems to be saying. It may be discordant and scary. But this is the mercurial music of the imperfect world we’ve got, so we may as well dance.

“Adam & Eve,” from Tatyana Kazakova’s “Grief” series.

Just like “In The Box,” the human beings in the breathtaking “Grief” series are rendered in blue acrylic. They are not up against the edges of the paper, however. They are, to their misfortune, exposed to the forces that the people in the “Box” are shielded from. Some of them cling to children who appear to be falling away. Others, like the long-fingered creature in “Grief #1-24,” are alone, stretched and wracked with worry and disbelief.

Yawning absence hovers over all of these pieces. In “#1-53,” a seated figure attempts to throw its arms around negative space: a mute, human-sized hole in an azure slab. Time has fled and the globe has spun, and that which has broken can never be fully repaired. What is salvageable is a prayer, a fierce acceptance of fate, and a direction through the wilderness.

It is through our acts of courage, Kazakova’s work tells us, that we discover what it means to be a human being. It takes courage to face our common predicament — and that predicament is life itself, with all its harshness, its compromises, its beauty, and perpetual change.

The Grover House Gallery in Caldwell will present “Tatyana Kazakova: In Spite of Our Fears” through June 27. Visit bravitas.com/galleries-events.

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