Alexandra Galkina

SUPREMATIST UNDERWEAR

Some of Alexandra Galkina’s works are distinguished by a set of features that could be qualified as ‘feminist suprematism’. Feminist theoreticians divide this movement’s art into two currents: “The first one is focused on abstraction, the second one, ‘feminist realism’, searches a specifically female visual idiom”. Alexandra Galkina’s work applies to both currents without belonging fully to any of them. The mask of the abstract conceals quite concrete objects of everyday life. While feminist artists had two main subjects: the female body (its forms and anatomy, its sexuality) and ‘traditional women’s occupations’ (housework, child care, marriage duties), in Alexandra Galkina’s suprematic compositions the focus of attention is located between the female sexy body and the stove, in the layer which separates them. In these graphic and painting series the main objects (clothes, underwear, makeup) are elements of ‘female culture’, or, to use Martha Rosler’s words, the ‘iconography of the female’.
Daria Atlas

1 MARKER

One of the important lines of Alexandra Galkina’s art is formal experiments with various art media, investigating their capabilities. For example, work titled 1 Marker, where Galkina investigated how much one marker can do. By filling a huge sheet of Whatman paper with strokes corner to corner, she watched how, as the ink in the marker was running out, the saturation of color and sharpness of line were changing: the final appearance of the canvas depended not of the artist’s plan, but exclusively on will of the instrument. Her second project called Lipstick (2010) is an experience in breaking the usual technique of «oil on canvas». The image in this case was not modeled on the surface of the canvas, it was the canvas itself: the work represented a gigantic lipstick, composed of three monochromatic pieces of canvas, one over the other.

FROTTAGES

Galkina’s work titled Frottages (2010), continues to investigate the formal language of art; however, here the work also investigates the themes of memory and history. Frottage is a technique of rendering, on paper, the surface texture of an object by rubbing pencil over it. We all remember how we played when we were kids: put a coin under a scrap of paper, rub a pencil over it, and end up with the cherished image of a coin. The works of Alexandra Galkina were created in a similar way: by using pencil strokes, she rendered on paper signboards of different municipal institutions, such as a police department, an unemployment agency and a hospital. The artist’s work has, in a way, captured a piece of social reality, and a unique piece, very personal one, devoted to a memory of a specific person.

MIXED MEDIA

Series of objects, 2013-2014

The lot of pencil stub and coloured Chinese pencil- sharpener is to drift in perpetuity. Perennially changing their master and living quarters, settling for long spells in colonies of paperclips and elastic bands used for bundling banknotes, they remain forever ”ownerless” objects. It would be something of a fetishist, who, when woken in his sleep, could tell you with any certainty the whereabouts of his pencil-sharpener. It is that insignificant an object. No one ever finishes a pencil; once it has been sharpened down to 2-3 cm, it weighs anchor and sets sail on voyage around the storage units of the universe. No one lifts a finger to throw out such a “littlun”.

Mixed Media is the symbiosis of drifting office species celebrating their own insignificance with a festive blast of reworks. It is a family of tobacco pipes, aimlessly pouring out smoke; it is a otilla of multi-coloured ships powering into the whirlpool of obscurity — full steam ahead!»
Svetlana Shuvaeva

THE BAR

The Bar was a part of the Backstage group show organized by the artists in the artistic studio in Moscow. During the opening I was performing as a bar woman standing behind the improvised bar desk and serving cold drinks to the audience. It’s a common practice to separate drinking an perception of the arts, in this case the cocktail reception becomes art with an artist as its part playing the role of a middleman. People were standing by the bar desk, discussed the show and other things waiting for their drinks.

LIPSTICK

WELCOME UNDER THE TABLE / 2018

“Welcome Under the Table” project could have become a quite predictable intervention of an artist to a museum space with yet another portion of legal institutional criticism. But it turned out to be not that predictable. Strange as it may seem, it looks like a collective provocation accomplished by both the artist and the museum. At the entrance to the Treryakov Gallery, Sasha Galkina places a relatively small construction reminding of Gulliver, Alice, Schumacher’s film about the suddenly diminished woman and the work of early Claes Oldenburg. Being a great master of scaling, it was he who once demonstrated to Sasha how any physical object in art is unstable and alien to immobility. Galkina has set a table for us the size of a room. Visible from all museum floors, it turns the Tretyakov Gallery space with all its current exhibitions into a giant total installation of unbelievable proportions. And thus an alternative scaling mechanism is been launched when such common notions as ‘top’ and ‘bottom’, ‘above’ and ‘below’, ‘low’ and ‘high’, ‘large’ and ‘small’ lose their usual meaning. It seems that now the action of this artful mechanism can be found everywhere. Accidentally or intentionally, the museum took part in a rather risky undertaking.