Anastasia Tribambuka

Anastasia Tribambuka (b. 1977, USSR) is a London-based multidisciplinary artist working across painting, printmaking, moving image, installation, and time-based media. Her practice moves through states of transition, exploring shifting identity, the instability of home and belonging, and the lived experience of inhabiting a female body. Projects often unfold collaboratively, with musicians, choreographers, performers, and audiences, allowing work to evolve in real time and across disciplines.

Her visual language spans figurative and abstract approaches, drawing from Russian Avant-garde, Analytical Cubism, Fauvism, and the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s, filtered through contemporary, mythic thinking. As a British artist with Russian roots, she navigates the complexities of heritage not as a burden, but as a lens through which rupture, transformation, and cultural memory enter the work.

Bio

The artist was formally trained in the traditions of the Russian Analytical school of painting at the St. Petersburg State Academy of Art and Design, which opposes the canon of academic education and takes its roots from artists like Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Pavel Filonov and Natalia Goncharova. She inherited the structural approach to composition and shapes, reversed perspective and bold colour combinations. The influence of Fauvism, Expressionism and sixties counterculture add an element of disorder, emphasising the interplay between chaos and structure that is a key theme in her work. Her background in illustration adds a fresh, contemporary edge, as well as defines the narrative approach and symbolism behind her compositions.

These visual attributes become apparent in her She / Her / Hers (2022) painting series, depicting portraits of women in various contorted, geometrical configurations using a limited palette of bold colours. In her painting series Right to Rage (2022), the artist adopts a similarly iconic compositional style and colourful palette in her portraits of female characters from across various mythological narratives as a powerful emancipatory statement.

Through her exhibition Nowhere to Go but Anywhere at the Migration Museum in London (2024), funded by Arts Council England, Tribambuka expanded on her foundational interest in the concept of ‘home’, experimenting with sketchbooks, video, sound, audience participation, and mixed media installations influenced by artists such as William Kentridge and Robert Rauschenberg. The works foregrounded process over product, presenting evolving narratives of presence and memory. This interest in layering and the interplay between past and present continued in her 2025 exhibition Palimpsest, where she used collage to combine fragments of text, imagery, and abstraction, exploring how meaning accumulates and shifts over time, and investigating identity, presence, and absence through the resonance of historical and personal traces.

Alongside commissions by international brands such as CNN, NBC, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and the Migration Museum, Tribambuka’s works have been exhibited and collected internationally.

Artist Statement

I was born in a city and a country that no longer exist — Leningrad, USSR. The world I entered has vanished, leaving only fragments: memories, objects, traces. That sense of disappearance, of instability, of the ground giving way, is something I carry into my work. It’s not nostalgia — it’s attention to what holds and what falls apart, to the spaces in between certainty and collapse.

I work with states of transition — moments where identities shift, structures loosen, and meaning refuses to settle. My projects often begin with a question that doesn’t have a stable answer: what is home when it stops holding, who are we when the world as you know it falls apart, what remains when something fundamental shifts.

At the centre of my practice is the experience of inhabiting a female body as something changeable, contradictory and culturally loaded. I return to aspects of this experience that tend to be suppressed or simplified — anger, ageing, desire, power — not to resolve them, but to stay with them and see what unfolds.

I often approach these themes through mythological and archetypal structures, using them as a way to step outside the purely personal and into something more collective and timeless.

My work moves between painting, printmaking and drawing, and extends into moving image, installation and time-based media. Each project finds its own form, and increasingly expands through collaboration with musicians, choreographers and performers. I’m interested in how image, sound and the body can operate together — and what happens when a work is experienced over time rather than as a fixed object.

Audience interaction is integral to my work. I create situations that invite participation and reflection, allowing the work to remain open, responsive and in flux. Each project operates as a space of encounter — a process rather than a fixed outcome.

AVAILABLE ARTWORKS

AVAILABLE WORKS ON PAPER

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