🗓️ June 13 -24, 2014 Tue–Sat, 12:00–7:00 PM
🎟 Free Admission
ARTre.FLEX GALLERY
📍5, Bakunina st., St Petersburg 191024 Russia
📞+7 (812) 332 33 43📧 info@artreflex.ru
◆Marina Koldobskaya’s exhibition “Blood and Roses”◆
Opening: Friday, June 13, 7:00 PM
Marina Koldobskaya paints flowers and animals. The kind you might find flooding art market stalls: dew-laden roses, cornflowers in pots, tangles of chrysanthemums, kittens, mice, deer that look as though they’ve stepped out of iconic Soviet tapestries.
But the deliberate banality explodes—blotchy blossoms are scattered like mines across the monochrome canvas background, phallic buds and beckoning vaginal roses emerge. Prey bleeding out, and disheveled predators reveling in the blood.
Symbols of mass culture are distilled to archaic signs; behind the apparent primitivism of a child’s drawing lies the painter’s brutal yet precise gesture, the sacredness of cave art, the minimalism of graphic design, the palette of totalitarian posters—and a multitude of layered, overlapping painterly surfaces.
Marina Koldobskaya’s flowers and beasts are embodiments of beauty and death, eroticism without a trace of sentimentality—blood and love—but above all, an unfiltered joy in the immediacy of the artistic act.