Santpoort-Noord · The Netherlands
AlexReznikova
Glass and painting artist
Icon painting, stained glass, canvas and digital work — forty years across four materials, held together by one thing: colour that only finishes itself when light passes through it.
Alex Reznikova · “In the Universe”
Alex on glass, icons and the light in Santpoort
A conversation about the road from a Kharkov film set to a Dutch leaded-glass workshop, and why she keeps returning to the same question: what does colour do when the light moves?
Filmed at the workshop in Santpoort.
“I can make you an artefact for this state — a certain colour, a certain glass texture, a certain way of meeting the light. It will hold that state in the room with you.”
Alex Reznikova
An artefact is not a painting and not a sculpture. It is a single object made to do one specific thing.
Coloured glass meets whatever light is there — sun, a low moon, a lamp switched on at seven — and the work is not the same twice. Turn the light and the piece turns with it. Colour and light working together is the entire principle; everything else is craft in service of it.
Each one is made by hand in the leaded-glass workshop in Santpoort, for one room and one kind of light.
Stained glass
Round panels, free-standing artefacts and leaded windows. The drawing is built from the lead line outward, so the composition survives at any hour of the day.
Painting
Portraits and figures in oil and tempera. Twenty-five years of icon painting are still visible in how the layers are built — thin, transparent, lit from underneath.
Digital art
The same eye without the glass. Colour laid down in light rather than through it — closest of all the work to how a window behaves at dusk.
Alex Reznikova, Santpoort
Four materials,
one road
Alex was born in 1966 in Kharkov into a family of the theatre and the cinema — her father a film director, her mother an assistant director. She grew up among sets, props, false crowns and miles of celluloid, and played at the editing table while her father chose the music for his films.
She trained in stained glass, worked in a theatre's decorating shop, then spent twenty-five years in a Moscow icon-painting collective: iconostases, church wall paintings, single icons, now in churches across Russia and in private collections. In 2018 she moved to a village in the Dutch municipality of Velsen and came back to the material she started with.
Glass and lead, colour and light, the sacred and the frankly physical, legend and the plain fact of a Tuesday — the work keeps putting them in the same frame.
“From morning until evening I painted angels, the saints, the Mother of God. You were inside that context the whole time.”
- 1966Born in Kharkov, into a film and theatre family.
- 1980sArt school for stained glass in Sverdlovsk, then the theatre's decorating workshop.
- 1990 – 2015Moscow. Twenty-five years of icon painting — iconostases, church wall paintings and individual icons.
- 2018Moves to the Netherlands, joins a leaded-glass studio in Santpoort, and begins the artefacts.
- NowGlass, canvas and digital work in parallel. Commissions accepted.
Where the
work has been
Velsen and the Haarlem region open their studios twice a year. Alex shows at Lichtspel on the Hagelingerweg, and on the quay in IJmuiden when the tall ships come in.
- 6 – 7 Jun 2026Kunstroute Velsen, 5th edition — with Gonny Wagner, at Lichtspel, Hagelingerweg 1. 12:00 – 17:00.
- Aug 2025Kunst op de Kade, during PreSail IJmond — work shown in shipping containers on the quay, IJmuiden.
- 31 May – 1 Jun 2025Kunstroute Velsen — open studios across the municipality. 12:00 – 18:00.
- Nov – Dec 2025Expositie Alex Reznikova — paintings at ’t Mosterdzaadje, Kerkweg 29, Santpoort.
- 6 – 7 Nov 2021Kunstlijn 2021, Haarlem region — leaded glass at the Lichtspel atelier.
Create the artefact
A commissioned artefact starts from a state rather than a picture — a mood you want a room to hold. From there it is a question of which glass, which colours, and which window it will live in.
Tell her the state
Calm, celebration, memory, a person. Whatever the piece is meant to keep in the room.
Glass and colour are chosen
Texture, saturation and lead line are set against the light your space actually gets.
Made and hung
Built by hand in the Santpoort workshop, then placed where the light will reach it.
Come and see the glass
The work, and the making of it, can be seen at the leaded-glass workshop. Pieces are available to buy there. Visits by appointment.