JERSEY CITY, NJ.- MORA Art Museum recently presented work by Alina Shimova as part of the group exhibition Equilibrium, which was on view February 21-26, 2026, at 80 Grand Street in Jersey City. Opening receptions took place on February 21 and 22 at 6 PM.

Born in Russia and now based in Miami, Shimova is a contemporary figurative painter whose practice combines classical technique with symbolic and anthropomorphic imagery. Her paintings draw on themes of identity, spirituality, and the relationship between the human and natural worlds, often using animal figures as archetypal stand-ins for contemporary states of being.



At MORA, Shimova's presentation centered on works from New Totems, a body of work that marks a clear shift in her visual language. While earlier paintings moved more visibly through a brighter, pop-inflected register, this series adopts a darker, more contemplative palette and a stronger sense of psychological charge. Animals appear not as decorative motifs, but as totemic figures through which power, vulnerability, ritual, and self-fashioning can be read at once.




Among the works shown were Bear With the Cigar (2024), I Got the Power (2023), and Classic Ganesha (2025). Together, the paintings suggest the breadth of Shimova's symbolic vocabulary, ranging from anthropomorphic portraiture styled with unmistakably contemporary cues to a square-format meditation on divinity and iconography.

Shimova's background helps explain the precision and layered construction of the work. She studied under the Russian painter Mikhail Satarov, has a Fine Art Restoration background, and brings an early connection to psychology into a practice shaped by extensive travel and cross-cultural experience. She has lived in Casablanca, Cairo, Nice, and London, and has exhibited internationally, including at Art Basel Miami and the Qatar Art Festival.




In New Totems, these influences converge in paintings that treat the animal image as a contemporary mirror: a way of approaching identity through symbol rather than illustration. At MORA, that language entered a museum context through a presentation that was both visually direct and conceptually focused.