ABOUT
ABOUT
ABOUT THE ARTIST
My name is Angelina Severino, I am an artist and multidisciplinary designer based in Amsterdam. I studied Graphic Design at the European Humanities University in Minsk and Visual Communication at the British Higher School of Art and Design in Moscow. My career includes work as an Art Director in advertising agencies such as TBWA, DDB, STARCOM, and recently as a Brand Identity and Product Designer for international clients like Yamaha, Coca-Cola and a number of Dutch tech companies.
Posteress is my personal artistic project where I research a diverse range of human phenomena – individuality, collectiveness, consciousness, feelings, imagination. Coming from years of work in advertising I have seen how our minds can be easily manipulated by attractive images and unfulfilled promises. This has inspired me to look further into the process of how hopes and dreams come to exist. Whether it is an innate process or an imposition of ideas, I believe this is a fascinating subject worth examining.
POSTER ART
DIGITAL AND ANALOGUE
The poster came to existence as the possibility and need for graphic design and multiplication arose in society during the Industrial Revolution. Lithographic printing opened the doors for reproduction and established the role of the graphic designer as a multidisciplinary artist.
100 years later the poster has become accepted as an art form, finding its place next to other traditional visual arts. This is the reason I choose for limited editions and unique mixed media artworks – to treat poster art as true art. Born digitally, my posters take the shape of 50 limited edition Giclée prints and one-of-a-kind mixed media canvases.
Inspiration
Having been born and raised in Russia , I take a lot of inspiration from Russian Constructivism and Soviet design.
Their brutal concrete monumentalism conjoined with sci-fi futurism reveals social and aesthetic aspects of naive, hopeful and simultaneously utopian concepts.
Grand Soviet
Illusion
For decades the Soviet and Post-Soviet people have been taught to love and care for a set of ideas and beliefs that were meant to be progressive, inspiring as well as revolutionary. The revolution did happen, even if only for a brief time, before it degenerated in the betrayal of the people who quickly found themselves in a society where they are forced to find positivity in their everyday lives in order to survive.
This wish to stay positive at the face of broken hopes and dreams is an admirably strong quality in humans everywhere in the world. New desires, wishes and beliefs are born and create an uplift and new stimuli for us to move forward.
THE MEDIUM
WHY POSTERS?
Russian Constructivists urged “Be a poster! Advertise and project a new world.” (Disk manifesto, 1923). Poster Art has always advanced in sync with society's collective consciousness and its desires and fantasies which shaped the artists' communication and creativity under the direction of commissions. Abstracted from its initial functions such as selling goods or promoting events, the poster is a perfect format for expressing the artist's vision and fantasy. Its artistic value, communicative potential and creative freedom are unlimited.
The poster as an advertising format has practically disappeared from the streets, where it used to thrive, and moved to the web. There it transformed into animated banners, website headers and popup ads. The format of the artistic printed poster therefore becomes an artefact. Poster Art now finds its place in private homes, offices, hotels, where it retains its "art for the people" status and its advertising duties, this time around promoting art in everyday life.