Olga Grotova was born in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 1986. Her multidisciplinary practice reinterprets erased narratives, focusing on the resilience of Soviet and Eastern European women, including her family’s experiences during Stalin’s purges. Relocating to London, England in 2011 to further her art education, she continues to explore themes of memory, displacement, and ecological crisis, exhbiting and receiving awards and residencies internationlly.
Artist Olga Grotova was born in Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 1986. Her birthplace, nestled in the Ural Mountains, is a region marked by industrialisation and environmental challenges, elements that deeply influence her work. Grotova’s early experiences with historical and ecological traumas, particularly the legacies of Soviet-era policies, shaped her perspective and continue to inform her art. Born on the eve the Chernobyl disaster, she reflects on this event as profoundly symbolic. Growing up, her birthday was marked by media revelations about the catastrophe, creating a unique emotional connection to this environmental and political turning point. She sees Chernobyl as both a symbol of ecological devastation and a catalyst for historical shifts, including the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 2011, Grotova relocated to London, England, where she attended Chelsea College of Art, completing her studies in 2012, before earning an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2016. These formative years allowed her to develop a multidisciplinary approach, combining painting, photography, video, performance, and installation. Her education also introduced her to London’s dynamic art world, where she began exhibiting her work and gaining recognition.
At the heart of Grotova’s practice is the reinterpretation of erased narratives, particularly the stories of Soviet and Eastern European women whose voices have been excluded from official histories. Through extensive research journeys to former Soviet states, she uncovers personal and community narratives that challenge state-sanctioned, male-dominated accounts. These stories form a feminist intervention, disrupting patriarchal and imperialist ideologies that have long defined Russian political and cultural systems. Grotova’s exploration draws deeply from her family’s own turbulent experiences during Stalin’s purges. Her great-grandmother and grandmother were deported to Kazakhstan as ‘wives of traitors’, where they endured forced agricultural labour. This hardship left an indelible mark on the family’s legacy of resilience, embodied in the allotment garden they cultivated in the Urals for three decades after their release. This garden, a site of survival and mutual care, became a powerful symbol of defiance against systemic oppression and informs much of Grotova’s work. One of her most significant projects, The Friendship Garden, exemplifies this approach. The project investigates the connections between land, resilience, and collective care, using the allotment garden as a metaphor for solidarity. During her 2022–23 residency at Studio Voltaire in London, Grotova expanded the project by engaging with diverse communities to explore gardening as a practice of resistance, anti-extractivism, and healing.
Grotova’s interdisciplinary approach blends painting, video, and installation to address themes of displacement, ecological crisis, and the passage of time. She begins her works in the darkroom, capturing the presence of plants, her own body, and even her mother’s imprints using emulsions. These images are later screen-printed and overlaid with earth and pigments extracted from minerals and botanical sources, creating strata and traces that reflect the way soil archives everything it encounters, without hierarchy. This concept disrupts patriarchal narratives by offering an alternative method of storytelling grounded in nature and materiality. ‘By interweaving my family history with socio-political themes, these works are a proposal for a "feminist monument": unfixed and ephemeral,’ Grotova explained (Re-Enchantment exhibition catalogue).
Her practice is deeply philosophical, aiming to challenge traditional distinctions between human and non-human narratives. By removing hierarchies in her artworks, she blurs the boundaries between foreground and background, allowing plants, soil, and human forms to coexist in an interconnected and equitable visual language. This approach reflects her broader critique of anthropocentrism, which she sees as a root cause of ecological and social crises. Her paintings often evoke aged parchment or shrouds, layering silhouettes of plants, limbs, and organic forms to create multi-dimensional narratives. ‘I started to think how soil and plants are sometimes the only witnesses,’ she noted, reflecting on the symbolic resonance of her materials (Studio International, 2023). Photography is another cornerstone of her practice, but Grotova favours experimental, camera-less methods. She uses light to expose objects directly onto materials treated with photo emulsion, creating photograms that intertwine the personal and historical. Her projects often juxtapose archival photographs from the Soviet era with images of discarded objects and debris, highlighting the silenced voices and overlooked stories of women within patriarchal structures. For instance, her 2022 project Our Grandmothers’ Gardens, exhibited at Les Rencontres d’Arles, used early photographic techniques to illuminate narratives about women’s lives and labours in the Soviet Union.
Her solo exhibitions have garnered critical acclaim and include: Debris on a Luminous Plain at Centrala in Birmingham (2019), The Friendship Garden at Studio Voltaire (2023), and Door to Door at The Shophouse, Hong Kong (2023). In 2024, she presented a two-person show, Track II, at DRC no.12 in Beijing, China, alongside Ahmad Fuad Osman. Grotova’s awards include the Garage Museum Field Research Grant (2021) and the Prix Découvert Special Mention (2022). In the UK public domain, her work is represented in the Roberts Institute of Art.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Olga Grotova]
Publications related to [Olga Grotova] in the Ben Uri Library