Lia Ashirova was born in 1991 in a small closed town fenced with barbed wire on all sides. She graduated from medical university and planned to become a pathologist. At the age of 28 she changed her field and took up art. Her medical training, which included dissections in an anatomical museum, led her to a question that still drives her work: what stands behind the physical form?
She works mostly in oil on canvas, which allows her to be in dialogue with the artists of the past. She also makes experimental works in plaster, video and photo art. Her practice draws on Picasso's Cubism, Nietzsche's aesthetic philosophy and the ideas of posthumanism. She builds an affective world in which the human is equal to nature, and she reassembles images by examining their parts under different optics. Rather than destruction, she aims at blurring established boundaries.
In 2018 she took part in a group exhibition in Venice. In 2021 she participated in group exhibitions "Awakening" in Moscow, "Exposure" in Yaroslavl, "Every Woman Biennial" in New York and a show at Haze gallery in Germany. In 2022 she took part in "Promolodost" at Baranov Gallery, Moscow. In 2023 she participated in group exhibitions at the Artichoke and Triptych galleries and "Wow, 2.0" at the Na Tagankа gallery, all in Moscow. In 2024 she took part in "Spirits of the City" and "Russian Code Is" at the Khodynka gallery, Moscow.
She lives and works in Moscow.
