THE EMPTY SPACES OF DOORS AND WINDOWS ALLOW THE ROOM TO BE INHABITED
The past year was very intense and important for Anna Zvyagintseva. She continued to elaborate on her enduring topics such as the body, fragility, femininity, labour, identity alongside her signature medium—drawing in various forms and transmedial variations. Through a sequence of artworks and institutional projects her method has evolved—which we can define as finding a form for subtle and invisible things and feelings through the means of art. In case of Anna’s practice, the “invisible” does not mean “insignificant”. Furthermore, her works on paper, sculptures and the recent film reveal the beauty of mundanity in all its complexity and diversity precisely through the focus on unobtrusive, inconspicuous, peripheral. This contributes to the space in between which is recognized to be significant and substantial.
In the new exhibit at The Naked Room Anna doesn’t present any drawings which has become the synonym of her practice. Instead, there are paintings and ceramics she has been working on for the last several months which may appear somehow unexpected at first glance. However, Anna’s method emerges here even more persuasive and acute.
These artworks do not form the series in its traditional meaning. Yet, there’s something painfully familiar in each piece. Something that captures attention and makes the sight slide upon the shimmering surface. But an attempt to recognise shapes of the material world in these uncertain outlines would be hopeless. It is only particular fragments of it that Anna is interested in. Even more, she is focused on feelings evoked by this fragments and is trying to vizualise them on canvas with means of light. For the centuries of its existence the magic of painting medium has been based on the artist’s ability to inhabit a two-dimensional surface with the light. Claimed to be conservative, it seems to be relevant as long as artists test the whole complexity of art practice by capturing the shed of light passing through the window or surface of the St Sophia’s wall lit by a morning sun. In these cases an artist examines him or herself through painting, Anna believes. And she dares to return to the painting herself after many years of abruption.
In opposition to the canvases that invite for a calm observation, Anna’s objects-vases appear to be stunningly material. However, the brutality of the execution borders with its sensuality. For these chamotte objects as much as for the paintings with their imaginable inner space, it is the in-between that matters. Interior emptiness of the vase determines and “assembles” its shape, as well as detects the space between people, corporeal participation of which is the key condition for the creation of such a vase.
The somewhat blatant maxim about the elusive beauty of mundanity would be a precise formula to define the new show of Anna Zvyagintseva. Ultimately, her personal everyday observation serving as the foundation for her canvas. She also insists on the practical use of her vases. Contemporary art is believed to play a role of a sensitive indicator for social moods and conditions. Anna’s practice isn’t the most obvious yet a very apt evidence of this statement. Of course, if for society we consider a single person in his or her own affinity with every lived moment in which we rejoice, suffer, move brush along a canvas, observe, doubt.
