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This autumn Voskhod Gallery is delighted to present ‘The Fleeting Light on Your Folds’, a solo exhibition by London based artist Katya Tsareva. This project explores the depths of our physical sensuality and vulnerability. The central idea serves as a time capsule, half-buried in history and yet still resonating with life. The exhibition seeks to understand our relationship with our bodies: why it can be so difficult to inhabit, why we might want to escape or suppress it, and why it remains a raw source of power. The liberated body derives its full strength not in spite of, but because of its tenderness.
Katya Tsareva examines the theme of corporeality by reinterpreting the traditional academic painting techniques, considering what can go awry in the process, and thereby engaging with countless transformations of the depicted form. Her artistic method presents the body as a means of processing the external world: an object of transformation that accumulates, alters, discards and disassembles.
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The exhibition is purposely divided into two parts and set in different locations – London, the UK and Basel, Switzerland. Visitors are invited to explore with the two distinct yet interconnected displays. The first one at the Brompton Chapel in London focuses on viewing the body as an initial element or cell. What does it actually mean to live within it? This site-specific installation features large-scale watercolors and soft textile objects by Katya Tsareva, serving as a metaphor for a second skin, so smooth and gleaming that it feels almost alien. The installation acts as a source of attraction, uniting pleasure and pain, as well as both hatred and desire.
The second part of the exhibition, following Brompton, is hosted in Voskhod gallery in Basel. The display, presented in the window, features large watercolor works alongside deliberately torn sheets of watercolor paper. Bursting through the layers of paper, the watercolors reveal our corporeality as a series of surfaces of varying degrees of appeal. They reflect the experience of living in this or that body as a vessel of catastrophic vulnerability and exposure. Katya uses photographs as the basis for her watercolor works; she intentionally modifies figures and fragments of bodies using collage and computer graphics. The large-scale watercolors are clearly the result of delicate, lengthy and painstaking work. Watercolors can evoke a wide range of emotions in the viewer simultaneously, among them pleasure, attraction, even disgust. Nevertheless, these sets of opposing forces are in a certain balance.
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We are taught to see their bodies in parts and to evaluate each part separately: breasts, feet, hips, waistline, neck, eyes, nose, complexion, hair, and so on. Nothing less than perfection will do. Beauty is a phantom. The question is, what sort of phantom — will it give freedom or confinement? To be sure, beauty embodied in the body is a form of power. It is a power that negates itself, for this power is not one that can be chosen freely or renounced without social censure.
Text by Angela Popova,
London, October 2024
The Fleeting Light on Your Folds: Exhibition by Katya Tsareva in Brompton Chapel, London
Past viewing_room
