Despite their simplicity, Anna Berezovskaya’s paintings keep selling out
Her prices have soared over the years, with the most expensive now tagged at S$165,000
[SINGAPORE] The paintings are soft and innocent. A damsel threads a heart with needle and string, while a knight naps on her lap. Lovers perch on a rock as moons of all sizes hang low enough to touch. The images are easy, designed for instant understanding.
And yet, collectors in Singapore can’t get enough of them. For nearly 15 years, Anna Berezovskaya’s shows here have sold out. At her new exhibition opening at Redsea Gallery on Dempsey Hill, works range from S$18,500 for a small canvas to S$165,000 for one of the largest. Simplicity, it seems, is its own currency.
On the surface, the visual symbols – the needle, the moons, the heart – verge on cliche. She doesn’t deny it. “A patch on a king’s robe or a bandaged finger speaks of hardship, of a difficult path,” explains the 39-year-old Russian painter. “Keys are the path to a lady’s heart – a heart that someone must unlock. Snails remind us to move slowly, to live at a measured pace.”
But she doesn’t impose her own interpretation. “Each viewer may find their own.”
In Lady of the Heart (2024), a woman in a strawberry-pink dress sews beside a sleeping knight. It’s sugary at first glance, but on second, it appears to be a ritual of repair. In One’s Own Moon (2025), two lovers tilt their faces to a glowing orb. What seems like childlike awe could just as easily be read as a reminder to respect nature.
Her special postcard-sized acrylics of Orchard Road, the Botanic Gardens and Chijmes (priced at S$3,500) look like Instagram snapshots in paint. But Berezovskaya elevates them into archetypes: each location rendered as a vessel of nostalgia.
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This being her sixth show in Singapore, she typically spends her days here walking the city and sketching impressions of “spaces filled with emotion”, she says.
Raised in Yakhroma, a town outside Moscow, Berezovskaya grew up with few toys but many books. Fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, Lewis Carroll and Saint-Exupery fuelled her imagination. She copied drawings by Danish caricaturist Herluf Bidstrup until she knew them by heart. Subsequently, she trained as a jeweller, learning patience and precision. The result is canvases that feel naive, dreamy and meticulous all at once.
She’s aware of her critics who dismiss her work as too sweet, too sentimental. But she shrugs it off. “What matters more to me is that viewers find both aesthetic and spiritual pleasure in the art. I want there to be a kind of soul within the work that you can approach and commune with – and it will respond to you.”
Chris Churcher, Redsea’s owner, recalls: “Anna was just 25 when she first exhibited with us. At her debut, prices ranged from S$5,000 to S$30,000. Back then, non-Singaporeans made up the majority of buyers, as many local collectors waited to see how her works were received.
“Since then, that balance has shifted. Today, her works are collected just as vigorously by Singaporeans as by expatriates. Many of our local and regional collectors, from Singapore and Malaysia, have acquired her works repeatedly over the years.”
That balance between innocence and depth seems to be what draws her audiences. Berezovskaya’s symbols may be obvious, but their directness is disarming. She calls her narratives “fairy tales for adults” – and if the rise of kidult collectibles, from Labubu to Kaws, has taught us anything, it’s that sentiment wrapped in simplicity is a market force all its own.
Anna Berezovskaya’s show Refractions of Love runs at Redsea Gallery from Sep 27 to Oct 16, 2025.
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