Alexandra Paperno is a young but rather reputed artist with her own peculiar style. On one hand, she represents the New-York style within the Russian artistic context. On the other, her art is still deeply rooted in the national artistic tradition. Despite being the part of two different cultures, Alexandra is nothing like anybody else. She is young, but her frame of mind is free and independent. Any redundancy of form or meaning is foreign to her art. Her works are translucent, graceful and meditative, sometimes visionary and full of disquieting presentiments. Paperno’s palette develops as a delicate scheme of complex tones. The work nominated is one of the two from her Birding series in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art collection. In the context of Paperno’s series the ‘bird motif’ has the touch of new symbolism. It may be seen as a metaphor of freedom, the soaring of spirit. Birds evoke the desire to cross all barriers, to gain wings, to dive into a dream, to throw away what is superfluous in search of pristine simplicity and purity... Yet, this series is reminiscent not only of Picasso’s dove of peace and concord but of Hitchcock’s sinister birds as well... Paperno’s complex multilayered technique creates an airy, ethereal effect. The artists fights down the canvas texture by mounting rice paper on it and using oil-glazing technique. Thence ensues the sense of spatial depth and penetration into the sublayers of wandering consciousness.