How a girl from Tashkent became a famous sculptor in New York

The bronze figures of Ella Kogan possess mystical properties. You understand that they are inanimate. However, somewhere deep in the subconscious there is a feeling that the sculptures are watching you while you are standing nearby and are viewing them in the exhibition hall. In a strange way, they look, penetrating into the very soul and beyond. Next to these sculptures, there is a feeling that these are not quite ordinary material and physical art objects. It seems to have come from another time-space continuum. A certain mysticism, penetrating to us with a sixth sense, magic and mystery surrounds these bronze bodies.

“Usually ready-made images come to me from higher spheres,” says Ella, “and I feel the need to close myself in the studio and sculpt. Regardless of your well-being and mood. It's bigger than me. I know that through my art, the higher spheres (let's call it that) come into contact with our dimension, and what was conceived somewhere above materializes here. I connect to this fertile field. It is it, not me, that truly guides the creative process. It's not even inspiration, it's a conscious need to create. Like the act of birth, through me, with my help, images of an imaginary world are embodied in this world.”

Ella came with her parents to New York from Tashkent as a 16-year-old teenager. Her father, Leonid Kogan, is a famous painter of the classical Soviet school, a graduate of the Academy of Arts. Repin, student of B.V. Ioganson and I.I. Brodsky.

Ella studied at a music school, where she studied piano and vocals, and generally planned to develop a career in this direction. In New York, she graduated from Hunter College with a bachelor's degree in music.

However, hereditary predisposition to fine art made itself felt. One day, in the early 90s, son Emil brought home a school assignment - to fashion a composition out of plasticine. Mom helped with homework. When it came to plasticine (actually, it was Sculpey - semi-professional student clay), Ella was so carried away by sculpting that she lost track of time. It was impossible to tear myself away. Since then, music has faded into the background, and sculpture has become the main work of her life.

For more than twenty years, Ella has been working with clay and bronze. At the exhibition at the National Society of Arts (National arts club) presents her work the last few years. Each of the sculptures has its own story, Ella can talk about them in detail, with passion and passion.

Ella began to engage in sculpture without special education and training. These were later lessons in New milford art center. For about a year and a half, Ella studied with Judith Weller, a New York sculptor, the author of the famous sculpture of a tailor in a yolmol on 7-th Avenue. In the New York Garment-district, where the local garment and fashion industry began in its time, starting with the local tailors to the current designers of the newest styles of clothing and fabrics.

And in the beginning, Ella sculpted faces and heads; she couldn’t get anatomically correct figures for some time. However, this skill also came with time. Ella learned to sculpt from life from Judith and acquired a sense of shape, volume and proportion. And now her most expressive compositions are, so to speak, half-length portraits. The current exhibition features about twenty such sculptures. A cultural trip to the vernissage of Ella Kogan’s sculptures will be a useful and enjoyable event for New York art connoisseurs.

The exhibition will run until the end of June. It is organized by the Russian-American Foundation (Russian American Foundation) within the framework of the annual month of Russian culture in New York.

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