INTRODUCTION Katrine Levin, founder Katrine Levin Galleries
Daring to drown a Murano glass chandelier - taken from the ceiling of a Venice hotel room - just because of its temptations to be ordinary. Daring to tell a person you’ve never met before that you love the sound of their voice - just because you do. Daring to live fully, unreservedly; to be yourself in all your technicolour. All this is Toma Stenko - she does what most of us dare not. Called the Russian Coco Chanel by her teacher at St. Martin’s, the great fashion designer Louise Wilson (whose other students included Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney), Toma was named by Vogue Magazine one of the world’s top twenty emerging fashion designers. Toma is also an award-winning director, whose documentaries and short films have gathered acclaim at international film festivals. She has the ability to see the extraordinary wherever she goes, in one film transforming ordinary fishermen into Apostle-like figures who catch fish falling from the night sky into their small boat. Toma embodies creativity, saying that she likes to see the visible in the invisible. Painting for her had
never been a secondary pursuit. She painted since childhood, using anything that came to hand - paper, walls, sand, silk, cotton, leather, canvas ... Toma’s husband, the renowned Georgian filmmaker and script writer Irakli Kvirikadze, calls her Fire-Girl. When you meet her, you’ll know why. Her great-grandfather was a shaman (in a village above the Polar Circle) and there is something of his great power in Toma’s artistic expression. When Toma likes something, she expresses it in an irresistible, all encompassing way that lifts you up and makes you feel like flying. But as with her artworks, it’s not all rainbows. Raised by her aunt in Georgia, she was taken at age 12 by her mother, a woman she barely knew, to live in Russia. She lost her father early in life. The subjects of the mother- daughter bond and the empty chair where the father figure should be feature often in her paintings which explore love in all its complexities and contradictions. Toma Stenko lives to the full, on her own terms, and knows exactly how love and occasionally the void left in its place, feels.
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