Olga Tobreluts (born 1970, Russia) trained as an architect but is internationally prominent as a painter and multi-media artist. She was a leading member of Timur Novikov’s ‘New Academicians’ active in Saint Petersburg during the 1990s. This movement rejected modernism and the avant-garde and turned instead to classical antiquity, Russia’s imperial and totalitarian past, Hollywood movies, western advertising, homo-erotica and kitsch for ideals of physical beauty. Tobreluts was the New Academy’s ‘professor of new technologies’ and pioneered the use of digital media on the Russian art scene. The art critic Bruce Sterling called her ‘Helen of Troy equipped with a video camera and a computer.’
In the Golden Ass series, originally conceived in the mid-1990s, fellow artists from the group in home-made costumes were Photo-shopped into fantastic settings from architectural capriccio or trompe l’oeil interiors where they re-enacted scenes from Apuleius’s satirical Metamorphoses.