The GIF universe appeared on our screens incidentally a few years ago without us realizing the importance it would have in our lives.
By the means of brief animations that border on being absurd, capable of changing our mood or making us laugh out loud, we have become familiar with a new form of communication that, for the first time, momentarily surpasses fixed images. As such, it is difficult to spend an entire day without seeing at least one GIF, and if we don’t come across one on social media, it makes us suspicious.
Within this amalgamation of brief moving images, Sasha Katz’s hypnotic animated illustrations emerge strikingly and with their own style, constantly appealing to the relationship we have established with daily objects and making us viciously hooked to their unique vision of the contemporary world.
This young freelance illustrator, a graduate of the British Higher School of Art & Design, is based in the grandeur of Moscow. From Russia, the stage of old political tensions, Sasha Katz lives and develops her work totally immersed in her peculiar virtual universe and seemingly at the margins of supposed cold Russian reality. Through the smoothness of her strokes, her GIFs immerse us in the soothing evolution of movement and pastel tones, in a very pop universe, with clear naive references, from which a unique anti-consumerist reading can be extracted. Ultimately, her animations appear to emulate small and ironic funerals of objects, mostly related to the digital world, which in a short space of time have become obsolete and forgotten.
Katz has developed a very interesting artistic portfolio that has resulted in her working with clients such as Converse, Giphy, Tumblr (this last platform is where she shares her unique vision of the world) thus blurring the subtle borders that separate the pairing of art and industry. There are many references in her work but it appears that pop art has most influenced this young creator, who only recognizes using digital devices. However, without a doubt, the most noteworthy aspect of her art is the constant improvements of banal objects of mass culture, designing them and putting them on a pedestal through fun drawings. In this way, we come across a digital aesthetic of simple lines and compositions that appear to appeal to the minimalism 8-bit of the initial stages of the digital era. With great simplicity and effectiveness, her work will probably be remembered above all for adaptation and interpretation.
