Elena Castillo

Elena Языкова Castillo was born and grew up in Moscow, graduating from Stroganov State University of Arts and Industry. Since then, she has been an active participant in all major State Russian Art Exhibitions and an author of numerous projects in public spaces, exhibitions and museums, in Russia and abroad.

In 1989 in Italy, she had her first exhibition of sculpture and, since then, she has been working as a sculptor, exhibiting in both Russia and Europe, where her work has become internationally known and collected.

In 1991, she founded the non-profit art gallery ROZA AZORA in Moscow, in which she was actively involved as art director until lately.

Since 1997, she began a new international life beyond Russia. She married David Castillo in 1999, and together they moved to Riyadh, KSA, where they lived for many years. It brought real happiness to this artist to find herself immersed in a foreign culture, with the opportunity to study the complex traditions of this ancient world from within, and to fall in love with it. Mesopotamia, Byzantium, Egypt, Ancient Arabia, these have forever become part of her reality and her inspiration. The clay that she used for her creations was bought in the homeland of the ancient Sumerians, the very same clay which, according to legend, was used for creating the first human likenesses!

Despite the religious ban on images in this traditionalist part of the world, her work was extensively exhibited in the Kingdom and neighboring countries. She was able to open her own Gallery, the “Private Collection”, which hosted exhibitions of International Contemporary and Antique Art.

Elena Языкова Castillo’s works can be seen in private and public collections and museums all over the world.

Since 2017, Soller has been her permanent home, where she takes pleasure in working on her favorite ceramics in her studio and exhibiting in local museums and galleries.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I love to sculpt. I have been doing it as long as I remember myself  but I am still fascinated with this mysterious moment when a piece of cold clay, which becomes warm in my  hands, becomes part of me, suddenly separates from me  and goes away  into life, independent as a newly born object and even builds it's own biography!
  My work is simple. I love the feeling of clay, love talking to it as I work - I love the process. My objects are very simple because I see a lot of beauty in simplicity and look for it. I try to fill my sculptures with peace, which  I seek in life but which I can only achieve in creativity while working in my studio.
  Everything in life is interesting to me, I love everything I see and I try to convey this feeling to people through my works. Each of my works, is filled with my thoughts, feelings, experiences, it is completed and separated from me only when I achieve in it that concentration, that balance that I am looking for.
  My still lives are static paintings, my apprenticeship, my attempt to see and create my own world - a world of silence, peace, kindness and balance.