Life in Space
Life in Spacelogically builds on the Artist’s observations of our life on Earth. She challenges us to imagine what life in the outer space would be like: how would we cope with the lack of sunlight and proper night and day patterns, what would it feel like to find ourselves deep within the vast and endless, but at the same time cold and empty cosmic expanse? Ms. Marina Fedorova ventures to suggest that people would be constantly accompanied by a sense of powerful nostalgia for their home planet, triggered even by the very thought of a potential chance to leave the Earth behind forever. Looking into the future, the Artist encourages us to hypothesise on how our life could evolve in the upcoming decades.
The Earth’s remoteness is expressed in these artworks by means of perspective: the heroines wistfully look at the tiny globe with cosmic nebulae swirling behind their backs. Here, on this new planet, both landscapes and architectural structures resemble the terrestrial ones, evoking a poignant sense of nostalgia.
One of the artworks in this series, Museum, later inspired the Space Art Odyssey virtual journey allowing the viewers to visit an imaginary art gallery in space. The painting shows an art space with panoramic windows located somewhere on the Moon surface: a character sporting bright red pumps obviously intends to visit the museum. The high but stable heels of these beautiful shoes rendered in broad brushstrokes, and the lithe legs whose owner is hidden from sight suggest a forward movement, reflecting the firmness and steadiness of intention.
The window motif appears again in At a Restaurant: here a glass separates the female protagonist from the endless cosmic space. The graceful girl in a red dress is apparently undaunted by the hugeness of the Universe. She has her back turned to us: we see neither her eyes nor any overt emotions, only a vague facial expression. She is holding a classic science fiction novel of the 20th century, Stanisław Lem’s Solaris. The heroine who remains a mystery to us is intently staring at some distant point, perhaps trying to distinguish the outlines of the erstwhile home planet and recall what life on Earth was like.
A painting conveying an extraterrestrial atmosphere through a contemporary, even slightly futuristic and concise interior pictured in it is Welcome to Café Earth. The picture shows a café somewhere far beyond the solar system which is freely accessible to any dwellers of other galaxies who wish to come and enjoy the singing of such immortal divas from planet Earth as Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo.
Another artwork with a slight tinge of nostalgia is called Suitcase. The lonely girl in a red cocktail dress wheeling a scarlet suitcase seems to be expecting something, perhaps ready to return to the planet of her ancestors. We see planet Earth looming in the horizon, its blue sphere looking friendly and welcoming. But is it really so? Is it actually possible to go back to Earth and inhabit it? It is rather more likely that the lonely figure is destined to be forever searching the outer space for the place where she belongs, the return to Earth remaining her impossible lifelong dream. This painting elaborates the concept of another work touched by the Artist’s trademark irony. Long before the present ‘Cosmic period’ and the creation of an entire series of artworks dedicated to space exploration, Ms. Marina Fedorova painted Lady Proton, a picture featuring a young girl being late for the launch of a rocket just like any one of us might be late for a plane or train. The spaceship takes off without her, leaving her to aimlessly wonder the Moon in hopes for a lucky hitchhike ride through the Universe.
Aleksandra Danilovskikh
Art Historian, Art Expert
In the spring of 2006, Ms. Marina Fedorova graduated from the Mukhina Art and Design Academy where she majored in Fashion Design and Illustration. The defence of her thesis was a true piece of performance art: Ms. Fedorova painted a white dress right on the model whom she just met face to face on the runway. The professionalism and preciseness of the Artist’s style was noted by viewers and critics alike at the first solo show of her graphic compositions at D137 Gallery in May 2005.
This year, the Artist is showing her two new painting series at XL and D137 galleries (in Moscow and St. Petersburg respectively). One is dedicated to the cult figures of the fashion world: Coco Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, Vivienne Westwood, Yohji Yamamoto, and the photographer Helmut Newton. The other one is an homage to such American art greats as the painter Edward Hopper and the filmmaker David Lynch (Ms. Fedorova even borrowed the title for one of her paintings from the latter’s film The Straight Story).
The very title of the exhibition, Autumn Time, refers both to the famous hit tune from 1968, Summertime, and to Jackson Pollock’s masterpiece Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) from 1950 (Pollock and Lee Krasner also make an appearance in one of the paintings).
Ms. Marina Fedorova is exceptional in her ability to show her subject in the immediacy of total disclosure. At the same time, the artist does not yield to the style and spirit of her protagonists, even if they are legendary fashion designers. She definitely has her own style, and there is no reason that would make her give up being herself. Portraits of fashion designers and genre scenes resembling film stills are created by Ms. Marina Fedorova in her signature style inspired by the aloof imagery of the French New Wave cinema posters, the detached language of Pop Art’s reinvention of advertisements, and the swiftness of magazine illustrations capturing the weightless glimmer of fashion.
The Artist’s paintings, seemingly saturated with carmine lipstick, are superficially attributed by some art critics as belonging to the currently popular trend of trash glamour. This is the movement known for utilising the ‘glamorous garbage’ from media images and making all-too-obvious nods to both Pop Art and Edward Hopper, the latter being credited not so much for his own work but rather for the influence his paintings had on the frame composition in Alfred Hitchcock’s films.
However, Ms. Marina Fedorova’s approach to reclaiming the iconic cinematic and photographic images is quite different. The phenomenon of global mass media recycling that so occupied the post-modernist minds in the late 20th century shows a different bend in the 2000s, focusing instead on image ecology.
The Artist sees her task not so much in mythologizing the powers of mass copying, but rather in the creation of a private space for artistic meditation right beside the objects of mass worship. This is achieved by means of adding her own interest to the impersonalized cult of the millions. Each of her paintings is a kind of such meditation, be it on the painting styles of Pollock and Hopper or on the designs by Westwood and Chanel.
In a world that makes it increasingly difficult to avoid fake thoughts and emotions, artistic practices yet again function as natural mechanisms of self-purification, if not self-comprehension.
The artists are responsible for the vibrancy of the visual environment of big cities. It is this vibrancy of the silvery colour in Ms. Fedorova’s landscapes or the sudden emptiness of the blank white space emerging between two cups on a table in her still lifes that make the inner space of these paintings living and memorable. The trademark painterly style invented by Ms. Marina Fedorova will always preserve the freshness and clarity of world perception for everyone who happened to resonate with her paintings.
Ekaterina Andreyeva
It is a well-known fact that all artists’ works are self-portraying. Swiftness of the eye, body movements, strength of touch are all reflected in painted shapes and drawn lines. Ms. Marina Fedorova uses the brush effortlessly and confidently. Her self-assured professionalism is tempered by a swinging, intermittent rhythm of movement and arrangement of shapes. The breaths in and out and the pause between them frame the inevitable cut-up of visual images, holding the lines, colour spots, and drawn words in the state of ambiguity, and therefore high potentiality, immanent to contemporary visual arts.
One Fine Day is the first solo exhibition of the Artist, bringing together three series of such pictures-moments-snapshots inspired by music and colour (Blues Story), film (Un homme et une femme), and fashion (Shoes Story). These stories are easily combined within the exhibition space, each episode being independent but at the same time sharing a common mood with the others. These weightless images – character faces, abandoned armchairs, and shoes as emotional copies of their owners – originate from a single source: an inner film invented by Ms. Marina Fedorova, in which characters, things, advertisements, stores, holiday resorts, and sitcoms find their momentous, at times harmonious but always aesthetic, forms.
ln the exhibition rooms of D137 Gallery, One Fine Day looks like a frieze or a strip of shots, fleeting moments lightly captured with paint. In the very discreteness of happiness, in the ability of joyous impressions to stem out of a human soul and proceed into the endless world, there is a scarcely noticeable melancholy accentuating Ms. Marina Fedorova’s blues stories. Looking at the elegant, sometimes sharp angles, one recalls both the immaculate designer freedom of the decidedly empty shots from the 1960’s and the currently revived feverish hedonism of the 1940’s, in a kind of reverse progression from Last Year at Marienbad to Casablanca, with Hearts of Four and Sun Valley Serenade also somewhere nearby.
Ms. Marina Fedorova’s exhibition tells us of her private infatuations and occupations, at the same time carefully, obliquely filling the screen space with the invoked shadows of the jazz and blues epoch which reaches out to us, entering our minds with fragments of its iconic close-ups.
Ekaterina Andreyeva
It is a well-known fact that all artists’ works are self-portraying. Swiftness of the eye, body movements, strength of touch are all reflected in painted shapes and drawn lines. Ms. Marina Fedorova uses the brush effortlessly and confidently. Her self-assured professionalism is tempered by a swinging, intermittent rhythm of movement and arrangement of shapes. The breaths in and out and the pause between them frame the inevitable cut-up of visual images, holding the lines, colour spots, and drawn words in the state of ambiguity, and therefore high potentiality, immanent to contemporary visual arts.
One Fine Day is the first solo exhibition of the Artist, bringing together three series of such pictures-moments-snapshots inspired by music and colour (Blues Story), film (Un homme et une femme), and fashion (Shoes Story). These stories are easily combined within the exhibition space, each episode being independent but at the same time sharing a common mood with the others. These weightless images – character faces, abandoned armchairs, and shoes as emotional copies of their owners – originate from a single source: an inner film invented by Ms. Marina Fedorova, in which characters, things, advertisements, stores, holiday resorts, and sitcoms find their momentous, at times harmonious but always aesthetic, forms.
ln the exhibition rooms of D137 Gallery, One Fine Day looks like a frieze or a strip of shots, fleeting moments lightly captured with paint. In the very discreteness of happiness, in the ability of joyous impressions to stem out of a human soul and proceed into the endless world, there is a scarcely noticeable melancholy accentuating Ms. Marina Fedorova’s blues stories. Looking at the elegant, sometimes sharp angles, one recalls both the immaculate designer freedom of the decidedly empty shots from the 1960’s and the currently revived feverish hedonism of the 1940’s, in a kind of reverse progression from Last Year at Marienbad to Casablanca, with Hearts of Four and Sun Valley Serenade also somewhere nearby.
Ms. Marina Fedorova’s exhibition tells us of her private infatuations and occupations, at the same time carefully, obliquely filling the screen space with the invoked shadows of the jazz and blues epoch which reaches out to us, entering our minds with fragments of its iconic close-ups.
Ekaterina Andreyeva