Ebecho Muslimova, artist
“I learn from the paintings,” Ebecho Muslimova says. “And that’s not just a cop-out so I don’t have to explain things.” Her works centre on a corpulent, ribald, transgressive female figure named Fatebe (pronounced ‘fatty-bee’) whose contortions and sexuality are deftly incorporated into technically complicated paintings, interacting with landscapes, objects and spaces that contain them. “When I started out with her, I had these very specific rules,” says 41-year-old Muslimova, who began drawing the figure in art school as a distraction from more ‘serious’ painting work. “The problem was that I’d started painting and I didn’t want to just slap a drawing on a painting, because that’s lame, but I also didn’t want to render her in painting, which is also weird and gimmicky. So how do I preserve her as an entity that is a drawing but in a painting?” The answer grows more involved with every series.
Born in Russia and raised in New Jersey – “I went to [Manhattan’s] LaGuardia High School, but lived in Jersey City, so we had to do this big lie”– she attended the university Cooper Union (getting a BFA in 2010) in the East Village and was then repped by David Zwirner. She’s currently showing at Norway’s Kunsthall Stavanger, where Fatebe appears within the gallery’s design elements. The character serves as catharsis: “Fatebe is able to express things I can’t for many reasons – society, physics – plus I don’t want to,” Muslimova says. “She’s like the serpent that shakes out whatever needs to be shook out.” And she’s not going anywhere yet. “Initially, the joke was I just do this character for the rest of my life. But that’s what I’m doing now. And it hasn’t stopped being interesting.”
