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TAISIA KOROTKOVA

BEAUTY OF SCIENCE

Press release 

5 October - 7:00 pm


The Gabarron Foundation in cooperation with Sputnik Art Foundation, Moscow, is a non-profit organization which aims to expand the boundaries of audience for contemporary art, present a new exhibition by 2010 Kandinsky Prize laureate Taisia Korotkova. The exhibition coincides with the festive week of the Gabarron Gala, and came to add to recent openings, Valladolid, más ancho que largo, and Jóvenes Creadores FCP 2011.

The exhibition "Beauty of Science", curated by Christina Steinbrecher, will feature works from Taisia Korotkova's Reproduction and Technology series.


Reproduction combines Korotkova’s recent experience giving birth in a hospital with her longstanding interest in updating the Soviet socialist realist genre of “production paintings” depicting scenes from workers’ everyday lives. Her subject is the rearing of children by laboratory methods, depicted on the same mass scale as collective farming and industrial labor was in the USSR but here, the idealized, heroic romanticism her technique suggests is coldly scientific and mechanistic.

Newborn babies lie in a row of incubators like goods from a conveyor belt. A single infant lies on a scale for future use. Scientists experiment with artificial insemination on mannequin mother and child, as if to indicate technology is now the arbiter of immaculate conception. The classic utopian trope of collective child-bearing first expounded in Plato’s "Republic" and viciously satirized in Aldous Huxley’s "Brave New World" is prevalent in our own, contemporary world.

The Technology series depicts the process of and fascination with spaceship construction. Man made machinery shining and stunning, serving as man’s prolonged arm.


That Korotkova’s art should be concerned with questions of genealogy, scientific utopia, and social issues is no coincidence. Before studying to be a contemporary artist, she trained at the Surikov Institute, a bastion of the social realist tradition pioneered in the 19th century by Ilya Repin seemingly untouched by the last century of art history and theory.

Both her parents are artists; her late grandfather, Nikolai Sukoyan, was a leading Soviet-era architect whose buildings include Moscow’s Central House of Artists, home to the Art Moscow fair. That biography is prevalent in her distinct painting technique, which combines strictly traditional icon-painting methods in tempera on wood with cold pastel tones reminiscent of optimistic 1960s Soviet illustration to approach contemporary subjects. The result is a curious kind of contemporary iconography, one that reveals the structures at work in modern society and inspires us to question, rather than canonize, the forces that drive them.

Taisia Korotkova (Moscow, 1980) is a Russian painter. Two works from the Reproduction series were awarded the Kandinsky Prize in December 2010 in the young artists’ nomination. Korotkova has had solo exhibitions in Berlin, Cologne and London. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Swedish Family (Uppsala) and the 4th Moscow Biennale (2011).