"...In
the series " Strolls about a Park" the artist's rich and generous
fantasy creates a majestic and affluent world in which the massive trunks
of trees and branches are spun into pillars and vaults of the solemn
Temple of Nature...She uses a variety of techniques- needle etching
and aquatint, colour lithography combined with etching, soft varnish
and reservage, everything that will contribute to achieving deep compound
tones with wandering steams of light catching out of semi-darkness sad
pensive faces, houses with shining windows...The more complex the emotional
life of the graphic sheets, the clearer and pure sounds the leitmotif
- a yearning for spiritual beauty and happiness."
Anatoly Kantor
Member of the International Association of Art Critics
Catalogue of exhibition, 1992
"...It is human habitation environment, that attracts her. If she
portrays pure nature, then, her visual imagery can be best described
by the poetic word "canopy", that is a certain thing , that
covers and shelters somebody or something. In most cases it is the canopy
of trees, fluttering, transparent, like in autumn, and at the same time
mysterious, taking the viewer into the depths of its mobile space...
"View from the Window" is the latest, most telling and complete
cycle Olga Okuneva. Conscious combinations and re-arrangements of fragments
of nature, human faces and figures, urban buildings , turn out to be
the basic compositional device in the cycle...
Alternating in the artist's graphic sheets, all this taken together,
does not so much from cycles, series or individual works, as a sum of
fragments, that equals to human life..."
Willam Meiland, art critic
"Transformation into Oneself", Moscow, October, 1995
Catalogue of exhibition
"...She literally builds up her "European" intaglio prints
with plates cut in uneven sections, in deliberately broken continuities
in imagery and pictorial space, yet she sensitively works out images
of free associations of persons, interiors, glimpses of the changing
seasons in nature, and her own self...
By contrast, her "Mahabharata" prints are compact in composition,
with a stress on the exotic and the decorative, and one is amazed at
her artistic assimilation of typically oriental conventions of figuration
in which the Javanese and Cambodian flowering of Indian Art and the
Rajasthani miniature all meet and get transformed in her deft hands.."
Santo Datta
"Discovering the Orient"
"The Pioneer", January, 23, 1997, New Delhi, India
"...She chose the "Mahabharata"; made a critical study
of it, successfully comprehending its metaphors and then nuances and
then proceeded to paint it. The result is outstanding. Within a limited
format she recreates the narrative, imbuing it with her own Russian
experiens of image making. With a sharp simplification of figures Yudhisthira
is defined almost as an icon of absolute authority;Draupadi is an archetypical
sophisticate...
Her works titled "A Road to the Indian Ocean"is a metaphor
of her own travel into a different culture.."
Sunanda Khanna
"Cultures merge across the backwaters"
"The Hindu",December,25, 2003, India
"...Olga's works brings faces, trees, moon, snow, hymns from Vedas,
poetry from Marina Tsvetaeva, from Tamil classic Aham, and then ornaments,
her veils like Rajasthani woman's "ghunghat". Her austerity
in full of ornaments: a gorgeous austerity. Even the self-portrait is
a veil on the self, the glass pane through which snow in seen, is a
veil allowing only that much of snow to enter your gaze which you may
enjoy before being frozen. Her Banaras is the city flowing away on the
water of the Ganges and being looked upon by the eyes of a mourning
silence. Here the symbols of the real have given rise to the series
of imaginary spaces, which then invoke the real lost in us, in our recesses,
in our sensualities."
Udayan Vajpeyi
"Scaling the Vails", Bhopal,December,1, 2003
Cataloque of exhibition