GATHER!S
Olesia Lavrinenko and Mika Plutitskaya
This exhibition is dedicated to painting and to women, to the pleasure and the pain that our work often brings us. Apart from the struggle of female artists for recognition still ongoing in many parts of the world, this show celebrates the women who have been able to make the invisible visible, who have taken the time to care for their medium, accepting the joy and struggle that make part of any caregiving. Both Olesia and Mika have their own non-linear relationships with painting. Their practices prioritize effort over expressive gesture; attempting and sometimes failing over moving straightforwardly to a set goal. Mika, who started out as an animation artist, came to contemporary art through performance, and feminist theory, and only then moved on to painting, which she now explores from a variety of standpoints. Olesia, on the contrary, started with painting, but her later work with objects and installation transformed her idea of painting, erasing the boundary between painting and the object.
Mika’s works are not actually paintings but silkscreens — she thus completely withdraws the representation from her prints and makes the process, its uncertainties, and experiments within it her co-creators and central subject matter. These technical aspects unexpectedly obtain purely painterly qualities. The almost orgasmic freedom translated by this new body of work is in stark contrast with the earlier analytical and history-centered stage in Mika’s career. Olesia revisits the painterly tradition both in terms of technique as well as in the subject matter of her paintings. She uses glazing to create a scene where what looks like the background of a classical painting becomes the center of our attention with its suggestive emptiness. The presentation of works manifests the artist’s free movement between painting and the object.
References to ‘the feminine’ recur throughout the exhibition — in the choice of colors, the title that is multilayered and along with the reference to an element of the female clothing, points to some installation choices, where works touch upon the wall or the floor directly — but never is this connection clearly stated: it finds its expression in the details of how the things are done. Olesia and Mika construct their artistic practices in different ways, following different drives and intuitions, but what they share is a feeling similar to the one we get from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own — the idea of slow-paced, solitary and focused work with the medium and techniques that they approach gently and with great care. In our exhibition these qualities, usually intentionally concealed by the artist, are becoming the main characters of the artists’ narratives. Just like gathers are created by the empty spaces between layers of the fabric, painterly experiments by Mika Plutitslaya and Olesia Lavrinenko are also formed of pauses, emptiness and the in-betweenness within their individual works as well as in their quiet but enriching dialogue.
Curator Anya Zhurba
