Valeria Konovalova
Experimental Watercolor x Meta-Magical Realism
Valeria Konovalova, known as Rikitavi, is a Moscow-based experimental watercolor artist working at the intersection of psychedelic and magical realism – a practice she describes as meta-magical realism.
Her paintings explore memory, loneliness, love, melancholy, and the subconscious through surrealist imagery rooted in the philosophy of Asia, the aesthetics of the 1980s and 90s, and the imagined worlds of 20th-century fantasists.
She held her first solo exhibition, "Rooms," independently in Phuket, Thailand in 2024.
Konovalova graduated from the Kosygin State University of Russia with a degree in Graphic Design and studied under the abstract artist Vladimir Pankratov. She organized and curated Rooms entirely independently, without institutional support. Her work has been sold to collectors in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She lives and works in Moscow.
She is the author of an English-language course in watercolor, and currently teaches through individual lessons.
Works
Experimental watercolor and mixed media works exploring the boundary between chaotic external reality and the human subconscious.
WHISPERING SHADOWS IN
ENDLESS SLEEP
Watercolor, natural pigments, tempera Wooden board · 2025 · 70 × 50 cm
Watercolor, natural pigments, cotton, ballpoint pen, LED · Cotton paper on wooden board · 2026 · 80 × 60 cm
HEART OF CREATOR
A reimagining of the forbidden fruit: the apple replaced by the artist's own heart, offered to the viewer as an act simultaneously of generosity and exposure. Text fragments embedded across the surface – drawn from Nabokov's The Gift – resolve, when assembled, into the proposition that unhappiness is one of the colors of happiness. Equipped with LED strip; the work is activated by light.
From the ‘Through the Prism of Blue Eyes’ series.
Created through a method of intuitive pre-sleep mark-making – composition dictated by the unconscious before conscious control intervenes. The staircase motif, drawn from Moscow's Khudozhestveny cinema, functions as a passage between psychological states; the threshold figures enact the conflict between the desire for transformation and the fear of what lies beyond it.
From the ‘Through the Prism of Blue Eyes’ series.
Watercolor, antique pin, tempera · Cotton paper on wooden board · 2025
SPUTNIK – 2
Laika's gaze, directed out through the picture plane, as an act of witness and accusation. The embedded Soviet-era badge – an original object, not a reproduction – anchors the image in material history rather than representation. The two dog silhouettes in the center field enact the logic the work interrogates: the structure of mutual dependence in which one life is expended so that another may advance.
From the ‘Collective Unconscious’ series.
Gallery, Press Inquiries and Commissions
Open to gallery representation, exhibition proposals, commissions, and press.
