Simchowitz is pleased to present Two of Us, an exhibition by Andrey Samarin and Lera Derkach, on view at Hill House, Pasadena. Please join us for an open house and reception on Sunday, February 15, from 11am–3pm. RSVP for address and parking information here.
Two of Us brings together the intertwined yet independent practices of Ukrainian artists Andrey Samarin and Lera Derkach, shaped over the past three years of living and working side by side in France. Without becoming a formal duo, their work has entered into a quiet, persistent dialogue — one formed through shared space, overlapping influences, and the subtle rhythms of everyday proximity. This exhibition offers that dialogue as a visible presence: a meeting point between two voices that remain distinct, yet deeply attentive to one another.
Although their practices reflect shared influences and unspoken connections, Samarin and Derkach approach painting from fundamentally different starting points.
For Samarin, painting emerges from the body before it becomes an image. Gesture, color, and composition lead the way, carrying the physical weight of the process onto the surface. His recent figurative works stand in direct conversation with earlier abstract paintings, revealing not a shift in direction, but a widening of the same visual language. When placed together, abstraction and figuration appear not as opposites, but as two currents within a single river of making.
Samarin’s imagery draws from the raw immediacy of American outsider artists such as Eddie Arning and Bill Traylor, as well as the emotional intensity of German Expressionists, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Edvard Munch. Fauvist color, particularly the luminous palette of André Derain, echoes through his work, while medieval art quietly anchors his compositions. Frequent visits to Paris’s Cluny Museum have shaped his fascination with flattened space, symbolic form, and the enduring visual language of medieval imagery.
For Derkach, painting unfolds through story, memory, and transformation. What began as minimal, instinctive gestures has evolved into layered, dreamlike narratives. Figures drift from canvas to canvas, reappearing in altered landscapes and carrying traces of former selves. Metamorphosis quietly drives her practice. Bodies shift, meanings bend, and materials evolve. Narrative serves as her point of departure, often arriving as a delicate thread that gradually gathers density, unfolding into form, color, and atmosphere.
Across this body of work, influences surface like ghosts and companions. The playful distortion and psychological tension of George Condo and Philip Guston appear in moments of absurdity and chromatic tension. Neo-Expressionist energy enters through a more visceral handling of paint. At the same time, the visual language of childhood fairy tales quietly shapes her compositions, lending simplicity, brightness, and a sense of suspended wonder.
Two of Us is not about fusion, but proximity. It is about working alongside one another and allowing difference to sharpen intimacy through watching, listening, echoing, resisting, and continuing. The exhibition holds space for duality, gesture and story, body and myth, structure and transformation, inviting the viewer into a shared, breathing field between two practices in the midst of becoming.