Koshenkova Maria

Most of the works of this series are part of the installation created for Mindcraft18 - Danish exhibition during Milano Design Week. Work was shown in South Korea Crafted Matter at Cheongju Craft Biennale and Kunsthal Charlottenborg during The Charlottenborg Spring Exhibition 2020.

Maria made the ropes out of glass, which is a kind of a material impossibility. Ropes bear multiple and in some ways opposite meanings such as: death and rescue, sexual tension, aggression, violence, safety and surviving. 

Artist want to investigate the concept of freedom and to examine the conflict between the extreme materialism and fragility which glass represents. These sculptures relate to the Japanese bondage technique – Shibari - a practice that amalgamates control and submission in one action.

When are you in control and when do you have to go with the flow? Are you ever really free? Where is the boundary between power and submission? Technically, she used the real rope as a model and needed to burn it out first in order to fill the mold with glass (to destroy in order to create.) 

In the Bodegones cycle, Maria Koshenkova develops another reference to the concept of the object. In this case, it is a reference to the prime of Spanish still life in the 16th and 17th centuries. On the canvases of one of the most prominent representatives of the genre, Juan Sanchez Cotan, fruits, vegetables and animal carcasses are depicted in stone niches on a dark background. The isolation of these familiar images with sharp lighting and a hyper-realistic style gives them a monumentality—in stark contrast with their perishability. The same dialectic is reflected in the works of Maria Koshenkova. Kotan achieves it by contrasting the consciously chosen transience of the objects depicted (fruits, dead animals and vegetables) with a brilliant and anatomically accurate style of painting, while it comes through in Koshenkova’s work via the contradiction inherent in the use of glass as a material for artistic objects. On the one hand, we acknowledge the fluidity of the material that is difficult to control (“glass never obeys the plan”), while on the other hand, we see the clarity and sharpness of the form that remains when the creative process stops. The contrast between impermanence and perpetuation becomes visible and tangible.

 In this space encompassing food service equipment, refined artificial objects made of glass, and references to art history, the artist gives the viewer the opportunity to sensually trace the genesis of the object and the space. The subject matter of her works fluctuates between healthy humor and depicting the inevitable. The French term nature morte (still life) is an apt characterization of Maria Koshenkova's art. The sensuous, lively movement of the creative process and the completion of the act through the audience’s perception are fused together and frozen in a solidified form. A symbol of timelessness. Memento mori.

Copyright (С) Boris Manner, 2021

Deliberately broken, imperfect and collapsed shapes, still reminding of a heart - the most essential life organ and one of the most reproduced and trite symbol. 

Maria wanted to bring uncomfortable and complex associations, to imbue the hearts with a sense of brokenness, fragility and durability –qualities which characterize glass as well as the heart in its understanding as a symbol for romance, love and life. 



She tried technically to play with the idioms pertaining to the symbol – cold heart, broken heart, warm hearted, heart of stone etc.

During the process of creating this pieces she made precise study drawings of real pigs hearts which are the closest ones to human.