What is beauty and which people can be considered beautiful? The standards and external attributes of beauty change quite dynamically. What was considered beautiful a hundred or thirty years ago, today can be perceived as bad taste or even indulgence. But in fine art, despite its visual nature, the meaning was always not so much form, but so much content. Similarly, with the beauty of people – a beautiful person is not someone who has big eyes or the right shape of the nose, it is a kind, honest person – a person who can really be called a HUMAN, Ukrainian artist Maria Oz believes.
Together with the Superhumans Center organization, which deals with the rehabilitation and prosthetics of Ukrainians who suffered as a result of the war, Maria implemented a project for the socio-cultural event “Spring Courage”. The artist makes portraits of people with facial injuries.
The goal of the initiative is to show that even in spite of trauma, you can see the beauty of people. Funds that will be earned thanks to the art project will be used for facial reconstruction surgeries at the Superhumans Center.
Maria’s idea is a combination of man and nature. In the photos and videos created by the artist, flowers and faces with scars do not look like a contrast of the beautiful and distorted by war, but on the contrary – as a complement, a combination of different aspects of beauty. The video format of artistic works adds dynamism and life to them.
“We didn’t know how to talk about it, because there is something heroic even in prostheses, everything is much more complicated with the face. I didn’t believe until the end that millions of people on Instagram would watch videos with flowers and write words of support. But it worked out. People were able to to see people’s injuries,” says Chief Executive Officer of Superhumans Center Olha Rudneva.
