The Naked Room invites you to a solo show by Maria Vasylenko entitled A Place That Doesn't Exist. The artist welcomes us to take a walk in the world she has invented, where conventional time and space do not exist, and to seek what lies behind the curtain of phenomena. Vasylenko experiences upheavals in her own way: she mythologises them and turns them into symbols. Her world is a projection of consciousness that takes on form and begins a dialogue with its surroundings.
Maria studied academic easel painting and sacred art but later chose to abandon the classical set of techniques. Eventually, her current visual language formed at the crossroads of working with colour and the formal aspects of icon painting. Vasylenko uses egg tempera—a timeless, transparent, almost intangible medium. Her compositional solutions are based on the reverse perspective inherent in iconography, which, following the genre’s conventions, places the notional ‘point of origin’ not in the distance, but in the position of a viewer.
Maria also deliberately rejects the standard rectangular shape of a painting as a window onto the world. She creates her works on recycled wood panels to give them form. This, she says, brings the sacred and fantastical elements in her works closer to a viewer. For A Place That Doesn’t Exist at The Naked Room, Vasylenko creates a common space of existence for them: she tears some of the works off the walls, making her mythical world tangible and inviting viewers to cohabit it temporarily.
“We are extremely delighted to observe the dynamics of Maria’s practice over the past 1.5 years: how her personal iconography has become more complex and profound, while her visual language has grown clearer. One might get the impression that her bizarre characters and sometimes playful plots carry an escapist quality. However, this is not the case, as certain characteristic details, along with the overall tension within the dense and phantasmagoric world of the artist’s personal visions, bring us back from the dimension of the fictional to one that is very real and acutely felt. We are glad that it is here, at The Naked Room, that Maria will finally open her world to the audience at her debut solo exhibition,” comment curators Lizaveta German and Maria Lanko.
