Katya Tzareva. A STORY OF ONE WHITE HOUSE: Curated by Ksenia Lukina

Gridchinhall continues its series of exhibitions of young artists and presents Katya Tzareva's first solo show in Moscow. Her debut project for Gridchinhall encompasses painting, video and a site-specific installation, created specially for the gallery space.

One of the key themes developed by the artist is defining human identity, often distinctly female, through its placement inside a man-made environment. Architectural spaces, constructed and designed by humans, simultaneously appear as surroundings shaping one’s condition and imbued with one's presence.

Katya Tzareva is the artist who also works in the field of architecture and landscape design. Her interdisciplinary practices converge in the spaces inside her paintings. Their geometrics are composed of planes of lawns and 'white cube' constructions, inhabited by animate and inanimate characters. Female silhouettes 'frozen' in awkward positions open up in the artifice of the roles they perform against the backdrop of clean and sterile landscapes. They appear in an inner dialogue with the series’ leitmotif – a white house. Each work becomes a film still, a peculiar staged photograph with a mysterious story read in the outlines of female bodies, in the corners and apertures of buildings.

The artist engages with the gallery space and creates an installation that lets a viewer both inside and outside of a 'white house', allowing for an experiment with self-positioning inside a constructed environment. The experiment the artist undertakes herself, capturing the process on a video shown in the exhibition.

Katya Tzareva: "I am looking to create a remarkably clean landscape and implant it with a form of a different materiality. Sometimes I replace this form with a female figure that brings a new emotional context to the space – what is regarded as melancholy, anxiety, tranquility, shame, awkwardness. Hence my body can speak separately from my self, my mind and emotions. What I feel in the moment of such conversation is irrelevant – it is only possible to follow a configuration of my body. What I can be is only a body”.

Katya Tzareva (b. 1984) has graduated from Kuban State University, faculty of Architecture and Design. She participated in group shows at CCI Fabrika (special project of V Moscow International Biennale for Young Art), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, The Framers Gallery (London), Eurasian Modern Art Festival (Yekaterinburg, Russia). Her works are included in a number of important private collections. She lives and works in Izhevsk.