Lena Hades

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Lena Hades (Lena Alekseevna Hades) is a Russian artist and writer, born on October 2, 1959 in Siberia. Her father was a communications engineer and her mother a doctor. When her father fell ill with multiple sclerosis and later died in 1985, Lena cared for him. This experience shaped her interest in death and the big questions about existence that appear in her art.

She graduated in 1982 from Moscow State Pedagogical University, where she studied physics and mathematics, and she later worked as a translator. At age 35 she decided to become an artist and moved to Germany in 1995. In Cologne she began making paintings, including a large series inspired by Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. She treats these works as visual metaphors.

Hades’ art gained attention over the years. In 1997, her Zarathustra cycle was shown at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2004 the Russian Academy of Sciences published a bilingual edition of Zarathustra with her paintings on the cover and twenty more works from the cycle. Her paintings are in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and in the Igor Markin Museum.

Notable works include the Zarathustra cycle and two pieces that upset some Russian nationalists: Welcome to Russia (1999) and The Chimera of the Mysterious Russian Soul (1996). In 2008 Russian nationalists filed a lawsuit against her, and in 2010 she was investigated for extremism and faced possible jail time for alleged hatred toward Russia.

Hades has also created portraits connected to the Pussy Riot case. In July 2012 she began a hunger strike in support of Pussy Riot, lasting 25 days and causing serious health problems. In 2015 she started an art marathon in memory of Boris Nemtsov, promising to continue until the person who ordered the murder was found. She reportedly drew many Nemtsov portraits during this project.

She has an autobiographical series called A Girl with Bows, which explores the world of death in a way influenced by Nietzsche rather than Christian imagery. She has published art books, including Chimeras by Hades: incite (2010).