Where the Body Breaks, the Colour Bleeds
By Lisa Knoll
20/8/2023
Exhibition Details:
Olga Khrapova at The Small Gallery, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, AB25 2ZN, UK
18 August – 6 September 2023
Image © The Small Gallery
The Small Gallery, located within Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, recently hosted Where the Body Breaks, the Colour Bleeds – a striking solo exhibition of new works by artist Olga Khrapova, curated by Artroom coordinator Jo Hastie and Sasha Burkhanova-Khabadze.
In this deeply atmospheric presentation, Khrapova’s expressive canvases engaged the charged environment of the hospital with unflinching intimacy. The figures she depicts – bent, bruised, blurred – occupy spaces of collapse and containment. But rather than illustrate pain, these works transform it: where the body fractures, colour floods in. Pigment becomes language where words fail.
In Figure in Blue, a curled body is enveloped by electric shadows – its form both protected and devoured by the canvas. In Kneeling with Light, vertical streaks of brightness pierce a solitary figure, casting the act of endurance in radiant unease. Portrait Without a Face confronts the viewer with a disappearing identity – eyes erased, yet somehow still watching. These are not portraits in the traditional sense; they are studies in psychic vulnerability.
Installed within a medical setting, the works acquired added resonance. Fire alarms, white walls, and the clinical quiet of the infirmary became part of the visual field. Khrapova’s palette – neon greens, arterial reds, tender lilacs – complicates any reading of calm. Her mark-making is urgent but never chaotic, gestural yet deliberate. There is grief here, and survival. There is a soft kind of defiance.
Where the Body Breaks, the Colour Bleeds was not only a gesture of artistic presence, but of human tenderness – painting as witness, as trace, as quiet resistance. The exhibition did not seek to be understood; it asked to be felt.
It is rare for contemporary painting to find itself in such direct dialogue with a site of lived care and vulnerability. Yet Khrapova’s work does not attempt to heal or console. Instead, it holds space – for fracture, for opacity, for the quiet persistence of being. In the hushed corridors of the hospital, her figures offered no answers. They simply remained. And that was enough.
About the Artist
Olga Khrapova (b. 1983) is a Russian-born painter based in Spain. A graduate of the Russian Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, she brings classical training in draughtsmanship and anatomy into tension with expressive abstraction. Her work explores the human body not as a fixed form, but as a site of emotional rupture, memory, and disappearance.
Working in oil on aluminium, Khrapova creates blurred, layered compositions that resist resolution. The non-absorbent surface allows for prolonged manipulation, enabling smudges and ghostly traces that feel like visual echoes. Her palette – vibrant, unsettling, and heat-soaked – acts not to describe but to undo form, casting her figures into states of flux.
Her practice aligns with psychological figuration, drawing affinities with Bacon, Dumas, and Brown, yet retains a voice distinctly her own. In a time of relentless clarity, Khrapova chooses ambiguity. Her paintings do not ask to be read – they ask to be felt.