Olga Goldina Hirsch, MA in Fine Art
"Dear Olga,
What you do with spaces (open, of course), forms, light, color, line, shape, and texture is astonishing to me--telling stories, recalling images and events, forcing the eye into new places and geographies, and at the same time disconcerting the casual viewer. Your art needs to be felt as well as seen, not because it simply evokes emotion but because it stirs sense. I can't imagine how you make so many of the figures that sometimes haunt, sometimes humanize, sometimes in a spiritual way almost transfigure your canvases, but the effect is very powerful and I congratulate you on what you have accomplished."
03 March 2021
Giles Gunn
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Global Studies and English
Affiliate Professor
Religious Studies and Comparative Literature
Department of Global Studies
Social Sciences and Media Studies #2127
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-7065
What you do with spaces (open, of course), forms, light, color, line, shape, and texture is astonishing to me--telling stories, recalling images and events, forcing the eye into new places and geographies, and at the same time disconcerting the casual viewer. Your art needs to be felt as well as seen, not because it simply evokes emotion but because it stirs sense. I can't imagine how you make so many of the figures that sometimes haunt, sometimes humanize, sometimes in a spiritual way almost transfigure your canvases, but the effect is very powerful and I congratulate you on what you have accomplished."
03 March 2021
Giles Gunn
Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Global Studies and English
Affiliate Professor
Religious Studies and Comparative Literature
Department of Global Studies
Social Sciences and Media Studies #2127
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-7065
Olga Goldina Hirsch was born in Moscow, USSR. She grew up with a sense of freedom which her young parents and grandparents had just gained for the first time, after the tragedy of Stalin’s repression. Her parents were born in the historical Moscow region of Arbat, which includes Arbat Street and adjacent streets and alleys between Smolenskaya and Kropotkinskaya metro stations where the community of intellectuals used to live. Most of them were repressed and had died in the Gulag during Stalin’s time. Her mother’s friends grew up without their fathers or mothers. Her mothers’ father had been a journalist and writer who was repressed in 1941 and died a year later in a prison camp in Siberia. Her parents did not talk about it.
Olga graduated from Moscow School and also studied the piano for seven years in Moscow Music School. She also studied painting and drawing, She was surrounded by interesting and talented intellectual people, musicians, and painters in her family, and among their friends. Both of her grandfathers, her grandmother, and her parents were good drawers, and she learned from them how to hold a pencil from early childhood.
After she graduated from School she took up science and chemistry in her father’s footsteps: her grandfather was a surgeon and her father a chemist in the Soviet Army service.
She graduated from the Pharmaceutical Faculty of Moscow Medical Academy, and completed her PhD degree in Biology in 1990 at the laboratory for the pharmacology of emotional stress, and continued to study antidepressants till 1994, when Perestroika began. In 1992 she got an international Fellowship Diploma awarded by the European College of Neuro Psychopharmacology.
In parallel with this, she satisfied her artistic interests as an expert in close knitting at Folk Art Exhibitions. Her lab was closed down after Perestroika, but after some difficult times she was able to continue her career as a Marketing Manager of hospital medicines for German pharmaceutical companies throughout Russia, from 1994 to 2011. She is an author and co-author of a monograph,and more then 100 scientific papers.
In 2011 she took up art after moving to London. She began as an illustrator of children’s books, and then got a Certificate of Art and Design in 2014 upon graduating the Diploma course at Putney School of Art and Design. Olga has studied painting, illustration, drawing, life drawing and experimental media at Putney School of art, SLADE, Chelsea School of Art and others workshops and courses in London. She is doing an animation course at City Lit from the beginning of 2020 and she is developing her skills in digital art. Olga has experience teaching children, and teaching a 6-week course in oil painting for adults in 2016. She continues to teach chidren at the present time.
In 2014 Olga began to write and illustrate her own short stories and poetry as well as to support a few charity organisations with her paintings, illustrations and post cards.
Olga graduated from City and Guilds of London Art School with a Master’s degree in Fine Art. She completed her theses “By The Window: Beyond Time and Space” in 2018, in which she considers the roots of Russian Art, and her own path in art as a development of the Russian cultural memory, and the ‘Cosmism’. She would characterise her art as within the tradition of Russian Conceptualism and Metaphorical Expressionism.
Olga's work are in private collections in Russia, London, USA including Booklyn Art Library, Canada, London, Bulgaria and at Copelouzos Family Art MUSEUM in Athens, Greece.
