Нuman being explores life by the methods that seem the most suitable here and now.

I started my carrier as a painter, then I worked as a conceptual artist, curator, critic, journalist and art manager. Some years ago I have returned to painting that provides an incomparable joy in the direct act of creation. And I treated myself to working for the hell of it – out of professional conventions and without a backward glance at the market, trends or critics’ opinion. This provides an incomparable joy of freedom. People seem to like it.

Marina Koldobskaya 

 

Works of Marina Koldobskaya are childlike in their charm and archaic in their brutality. It is as if they had stepped out of the pages or a sketchbook or down from the walls of a Paleolithic cave – territories of the protolanguage, simultaneously sacral and profane. 

All the series of pictorial works by Marina Koldobskaya are united by the artist’s general tendency to push the envelope of traditional painting. By exposing professional devices to the maximum, the artist removes, layer by layer, the multi-millennium practice of art history, getting to the essentials of the protolanguage of art. At the author’s pleasure, large-scale canvases become half cave roofs of the Paleolithic Age, half a page from the children drawing book: the sacral territory of expression. From the pictures, we are closely observed by packs of predators that pulled their prey to pieces and are now drunk with blood flows, and postcard flowers lost their decorative aspect and turned into the monsters that devour with their bud’s trap the viewer who passes by. Expressive images-totems are plain to everybody, much like everybody is familiar with the emotions which are common to a human and an animal: fury, lust, thirst and fear. 

Andrey Sakov, art-historian 

NAME: Marina Koldobskaya
BORN: 16.10 1961 in Leningrad, USSR
EDUCATION: graduated from High School of Art and Design, n.a. V. Mukhina in Leningrad, in 1985, specializing in design.
CONTACT: 191040 Pushkinskaya 10, studio 308, St. Petersburg, Russia
+7 9219534534
skype: koldobskaya
www.marinakoldobskaya.com 
marina.koldobskaya@gmail.com 

MEMBERSHIP

• European Culture Parliament
• Free Culture Fellowship
• CYLAND art media lab collective

 

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS (last 5 years) 

2014

• Cyberfest-2014, The Other Home exhibition, Bethanien Quartier, Berlin
• AQUA Art Miami, booth of Roza Azora gallery, Miami
• Territory of Freedom, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
• Stamens-Pistils, solo show, Museum of Contemporary Art of St. Petersburg State University
• Blood & Roses, solo show, Art.re.FLEX gallery, St. Petersburg – Lisi Haemmerle Galerie, Bregenz
• Art Bodensee, Lisi Haemmerle Galerie booth, Dornbirn
• Capital of Nowhere, The State Hermitage Museum, International Educational Centre
• Manifesta 10, parallel program, The Other Home exhibition, Frants Gallery Space, St. Petersburg
• Art Vilnius 2014, solo project, mural painting
• The End, Vilnius

2013

• Covered With Snow, Loft-project ETAGI, St.Petersburg
• Contemporary Istanbul, booth of Art re.FLEX Gallery, Istanbul
• Capital of Nowhere, Ca Foscari Zattere, Venice
  
• Art Moscow art fair, booth of Roza Azora Gallery, Moscow
  
• Hardly Any Blood, solo show, Art re. FLEX Gallery, St.Petersburg
  
• Rose-Mimosa-Poppy, Roza Azora Gallery, Moscow
  
• The Crosses, Erarta Museum, St.Petersburg

2012

• Resonant Matter, The State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg
• Count Down (retrospective solo show), Museum of Non-conformist Art, St.Petersburg
• Conversion Project, mural painting, St.Petersburg
• Art Vilnius, solo project, mural painting at Frants Gallery Space booth
• Hunting & Gathering, (solo show & master-classes) The State Hermitage Museum, Educational Center

2011

• Total Contemporary Night, solo show, mural painting, Rizzordi Foundation loft, SPb
• We Are Here, special project for 54th Venice Biennale, Ca Foscari Universita, Venice
• Art Vilnius, solo project, mural painting at Frants Gallery Space booth
• Black & White, PERMM Museum of contemporary Art, Perm

2010

• Cyberfest-2010, St.Petersburg
• Black & White, Modernariat Gallery, St.Petersburg
• Red Chips, solo show, Kremlin Gallery, St.Petersburg
• Zen’d Art, 20 years of women art on post-Soviet space, Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art Gogolfest, Kiev
• Gold For People, Central Exhibition Hall, St.Petersburg – Samara Art-Centre, Samara
• Meninas, Erarta Museum, SPb

Art works by Marina Koldobskaya are in State Hermitage Museum, State Museum of Political History of Russia (St.Petersburg), State Museum of Fine Art of Tatarstan Republic (Kazan), Museum of Non-conformist Art (St.Petersburg), Collection of Central Exhibition Hall Manege (St. Petersburg), Kuyosei No Sato Museum (Fukuouka), Angerlehner Museum (Thalheim bei Wels), in many galleries, private and corporative collections in Russia, USA, Germany, Austria, Finland, France, Holland, Sweden, England.

 

HUNTING & GATHERING 

Series of public events, since 2011 

A public session of the monumental mural – the genre that the artist has practiced in the recent years across the board, from an atrium of the Hermitage Museum to the walls of vacated houses – expresses her intentions the best. This is simultaneously an audiovisual performance and painting: much like an artist-shaman, she does her magic over the figures of giant animals, simultaneously engendering and sacrificing a latter-day totem. Microphones, attached to the surface, read the sounds of dabs, brushstrokes, falling drops of paint and send them to a DJ control board where they are processed by assistant musicians. The artist works with the speed of lightening; during 30 to 40 minutes, the viewer sees now a butchered deer that thrashes in agony, now a predator, intoxicated with blood, with locks of the prey in his jaws. This monumental calligraphy is rendered in three rudimentary colors – black, white and red – that Koldobskaya imbues with their primary symbolism: light, darkness, blood. 

Images from this series show animals in crucial moments: when they are dying, fighting, suffering from wound, devour their prey, giving birth and so on. Artist chooses for picturing animals, familiar everybody since his/her childhood both from everyday life and popular images – as cats, mouses, deers, swans, bulls, flys and so on. 

Andrew Sakov, art historian 

 

Hardly Any Blood, wall-painting session, open for visitor, accompanied by interactive sound art 2013, Art re. FLEX gallery, St. Petersburg 

 

The End, wall-painting session in Conversion project, abandoned caserne, St. Petersburg, 2012

 

Wordless, wall-painting session on Vilnius Art Fair, stand of Frants Gallery Space, 2011