Artist’s Statement: I want the viewer to understand how ultimately fragile we all are, and at the same time how strong and resilient. I want my works to awaken positive feelings, to empower and have a healing impact.

Mission: My sculptures capture a moment frozen for eternity. But each of them has a longer story to tell. The thoughts, hopes, memories and fears that have shaped me as a person likewise shape my works. My creativity is authentic and electrifying precisely because it is a metaphoric translation of my life’s struggles and experiences. My sculptures are inspired by ideas of tolerance and acceptance of our diversity. I want to challenge the viewer to a discussion, perhaps even a heated debate.

Biography:

For many people, art is a calling, for Ella art flows through her veins. Leonid Kogan, Ella`s father, studied art at the Academy of Art in St. Petesrburg. Leonid Kogan learned to paint still life from some of the great modern Russian teachers, such as Isaak Brodsky, and Bershadsky and Boris Ioganson. His works are in displayed in Tretiakovka Russian Museum in St.Petersburg and private collections.

Ella`s childhood was painted with strokes of brilliance. Leonid`s artistic mind sculpted Ella`s passion to communicate her ideas of beauty and pain through art. Ella`s son, Emil, has followed in his grandfather and mother`s path by creating chaotically controlled Jackson Pollack-esque paintings. For the Kogan`s, art is dripped, sculpted, and brushed by a wiring deeply imbedded into their inner design.

For Ella, art is the beginning of a conversation. She sculpts to provoke and communicate.

The artist does not attempt to imitate reality. Her work reflects reality on a metaphysical level, bringing to the surface what lies beneath. She takes her entire life with her into her art. Each thought, hope, memory and fear that has shaped her as a person likewise shapes her works.

Ella’s high professionalism as a sculptor, coupled with her intuition, her innate sense of form and her personal vision makes the artist’s work truly unique and admirable. A nude is not about portraying flesh, muscle, bone or skin. It only serves to bare the human story enclosed within. “My sculptures display a moment frozen for infinity”, says the artist. “Yet, they are ever ready to move, breathe and speak”.

We live in a world where the human potential for good and evil has increased enormously, in a world of very few illusions and definite answers. The eternal harmony manifested in the art of the Renaissance seems gone forever. Ella Kogan expresses through her work the eternal uncertainly and inherent turmoil of the human predicament. Out of the disintegrated parts of a once finished sculpture a work infused with new insight is born.

“I do not claim to know all the answers”, says the artist. “In fact, I feel that I have succeeded in bringing a sculpture to life when someone can imagine the same subject differently from how I represented it.”

Freedom and Imagination are the two words that immediately come to mind when looking at the talented sculptures created by Ella Kogan.