Alina Schedrina: a flood of details
and colouring the world
and colouring the world
Sasha Kremenets
14 August 2025, Belgrade
14 August 2025, Belgrade
Contemporary illustration, as a genre of art and cultural production — is a real trap for those who only dare to engage in it. It requires seemingly hard-to-combine things: an extremely pronounced personal style, a striking manner of stylisation or deformation of depicted objects, incredible diligence, and one’s own unique philosophy of illustrating.
Since the 1990s, the epithet "illustrative" has acquired negative connotations, signifying that the artist (illustrator, director, composer) "simply, flatly, and superficially illustrates a text/book/play/idea" without deep penetration into the original material. It was precisely this professional belief that triggered the boom of new illustrating methods (associative, denying, combined, etc.). And another difficulty is that the illustration market at the moment has too many active professionals. Because of all the above, it is very difficult to make a name for oneself in this profession. But despite this, the third decade of the twenty-first century continues to bring us new, truly talented illustrators and artists who manage to overcome all professional barriers and successfully develop their artistic practice.
Since the 1990s, the epithet "illustrative" has acquired negative connotations, signifying that the artist (illustrator, director, composer) "simply, flatly, and superficially illustrates a text/book/play/idea" without deep penetration into the original material. It was precisely this professional belief that triggered the boom of new illustrating methods (associative, denying, combined, etc.). And another difficulty is that the illustration market at the moment has too many active professionals. Because of all the above, it is very difficult to make a name for oneself in this profession. But despite this, the third decade of the twenty-first century continues to bring us new, truly talented illustrators and artists who manage to overcome all professional barriers and successfully develop their artistic practice.
Our heroine today is Alina Schedrina — a native of Tashkent (Uzbekistan), illustrator, and graduate of the HSE Art and Design School (Moscow, Russia), whose work is based on Uzbek cultural motifs, the theme of memory, and personal migration experience. She is actively developing her international career, creating illustrated books and zines, public murals, experimental prints, and mixed media works. Her style can be described as extremely detailed. As soon as you look at her works, you plunge into a whirlpool of details, which, however, do not appear as clutter, chaos, or something frustrating. Her works are harmonious, compositionally consistent, and tonally well-structured. She uses a bright but also, in some sense, restrained colour palette, designed to highlight the human emotional dimension of the place or situation she depicts. This may be either an unnaturally warm and colourful tint of a dreary post-Soviet apartment block or, conversely, the inclusion of coloured elements in black-and-white images. The main intention of Alina Schedrina’s philosophy of illustrating is attentiveness to seemingly insignificant elements. By almost political will, she does not allow small details to dissolve into the overall composition and makes them in some way equal to heroes and large central objects. Such work with colour and themes is a complex visualisation of the mechanisms of human memory, with its lacunae and painful attachments, fading and highlighting, obsessions and subtle sadness. The illustrative philosophy of Alina Schedrina is the acceptance of the world and the mechanisms of memory, which both preserve and reconcile and forget (but there is no crime in this) and justify and, if something is embellished, then only out of great love. In general, the theme of love for the past runs like a red thread through the artist’s entire practice, but this is mature love, reflected upon, accepting the past not only as a picture-postcard image but also as a source of problems in the present and future. All this together creates an incredible effect from the viewer’s and reader’s interaction with her works, which, in their totality or collected in books and zines, serve simultaneously as catalogues, autofiction testimonies, personal diaries, and concrete statements on concrete themes.
The most paradoxical and emotionally stirring of her recent works is Wimmelbook New Year Traditions: Frost and North Save the New Year, 2024 (Alpina.Kids Publishing House). This is an illustrated book dedicated to New Year traditions of different countries and peoples, which embodies the unifying vision of the artist, who in the festive bringing together of various groups of people finds at the same time a universal key to human nature, striving to dissolve in collective joyful experience — and at the same time this universality poses a silent, slightly sad question: why are human communities so divided if at their core lies the need for shared performative happiness? Wimmelbook by Alina Schedrina conveys a mixture of fascination with people, the desire of a child’s capricious will to colour the whole grey world around, and a mature, slightly cheerful and slightly sad gaze from above at oneself and at the people with whom one associates oneself. Alina Schedrina is undoubtedly at this moment one of those who are expanding the possibilities of book illustration and are at the forefront of its development. In the near future this book will be translated and published in several European languages.
The most paradoxical and emotionally stirring of her recent works is Wimmelbook New Year Traditions: Frost and North Save the New Year, 2024 (Alpina.Kids Publishing House). This is an illustrated book dedicated to New Year traditions of different countries and peoples, which embodies the unifying vision of the artist, who in the festive bringing together of various groups of people finds at the same time a universal key to human nature, striving to dissolve in collective joyful experience — and at the same time this universality poses a silent, slightly sad question: why are human communities so divided if at their core lies the need for shared performative happiness? Wimmelbook by Alina Schedrina conveys a mixture of fascination with people, the desire of a child’s capricious will to colour the whole grey world around, and a mature, slightly cheerful and slightly sad gaze from above at oneself and at the people with whom one associates oneself. Alina Schedrina is undoubtedly at this moment one of those who are expanding the possibilities of book illustration and are at the forefront of its development. In the near future this book will be translated and published in several European languages.
You can find the book Wimmelbook New Year Traditions: Frost and North Save the New Year on the bookshelf in Nordistica Gallery. We invite you to enjoy the book and please do not miss the precious chance to touch the art of Alina Schedrina.
14 August 2025, Belgrade
Sasha Kremenets
Sasha Kremenets
