About the work
Pugacheva paints animals the way she paints everything else: as stand-ins for something she's working through. A cow is specific — it belongs somewhere, it is tethered to landscape, to agriculture, to a particular kind of countryside that exists in Russian childhood memory and nowhere in Dubai. The horizontal format at 100×140 centimetres gives the animal room, gives it the expansiveness of a field it is no longer standing in. The blue palette that defines her work makes it strange: this is not a pastoral painting. It is a painting about distance from a pastoral.
