Husar Handbook: Natalka Husar

Natalka Husar is a socially conscious artist passionately engaged in reflections on art and history. Her lifelong obsession with painting and with Ukraine, her ancestral home, has led her to create an overwhelming and immediately identifiable body of work centered on the conflict between the ideal of womanhood as silent and compliant and the self she sees as powerful and aggressive. Her complex images convey multiple narratives of the past and the present, of autobiography and social history, and of the lives of girls and women caught on the cusp of change. The view would be unrelenting were it not for a dark wit and an attention to texture and fabric reminiscent of Rembrandt and Vermeer.  This sumptuously produced publication provides, as the title suggests, a unique visual and intellectual encounter with the work of a singular artist. Five essays and a text by the artist are accompanied by numerous color plates and fold-outs. Born in New Jersey and a graduate of Rutgers, Husar lives and works in Toronto. Published to accompany the nationally touring exhibition, The Burden of Innocence.