Maria Kulagina. 9 rooms, without end and beginning Automatic translate

The Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents Maria Kulagina’s personal project “9 rooms, without end and beginning.” The exhibition is dedicated, on the one hand, to the study of painting as a contemporary medium, and on the other hand, to the archeology of modern consciousness. The author invites the viewer to think about eternal questions: about the meaning of the drama of life, its cyclical nature and the fact that without various kinds of tests the birth of a new one is impossible.

Maria Kulagina is interested in the law that operates both in nature and in society: no matter what happens in the world, at the micro or macro level, after cataclysms, life resumes again and again. The artist invites the viewer to follow a certain route through the exhibition, each room of which is dedicated to its own theme, and to feel themselves in the space of “big history”. The idea of ​​the infinity of life becomes the unifying theme for all the halls. The key works for the project speak about the good beginning of the world, about the higher meaning of the trials undergone: “The Entering Angel”, which greets guests at the beginning, and “The Embracing Angel” - at the end of the exhibition. This decision is intended to indicate the circularity of time and the conventionality of the end.

The main theme of Maria Kulagina’s work was the study of the plastic beginning of painting. The artist’s most characteristic works are large-format pictorial reliefs. In them, the image seems to swell, become voluminous, and in places turns into an almost round sculpture. Extremely important for the author of the current project is interaction with the viewer’s space. In the open process of painting “making” one can see the genetic connection of Maria Kulagina’s art with the avant-garde art of the early twentieth century. However, she does not have the former avant-garde life-building pathos, but there is an experience of the uniqueness of every moment of her current life.

The exhibition will feature both the early, purely pictorial works of Maria Kulagina, and her many spatial works of recent years, as well as objects specially created for the project “Entering Angel”, “Embracing Angel”, a video and sound installation with the general title “The Passage of Time” "

Maria Kulagina was born in 1961 in Moscow. In 1982 she graduated from the Moscow State Art University in memory of 1905. Since 1984 she began to participate in exhibitions, and since 1989 she has been a member of the Moscow Union of Artists. Maria Kulagina belongs to a famous artistic dynasty, which was made up of avant-garde artists - one of the founders of photomontage Gustav Klutsis (1895-1938), his faithful ally Valentina Kulagina (1902-1987) and bright Moscow artists who began their journey during the “thaw” - Yuri Pavlov (born 1932) and Larisa Fedotieva (1935-2021).

Works by Maria Kulagina are in the collection of MMOMA, the State Russian Museum, the St. Petersburg Museum of Art of the XX-XXI centuries, the Yaroslavl Art Museum, the Vologda Regional Art Gallery, the Tomsk Regional Art Museum, the Kemerovo Regional Museum of Fine Arts, the New Jerusalem Art Museum, the Ryazan Art Museum. I. P. Pozhalostin, as well as in private collections in Russia and abroad. Maria Kulagina was awarded the Silver and Gold medals of the Russian Academy of Arts (2009, 2019), the Pyotr Konchalovsky Prize (2012), and the Silver and Gold medals of the Ministry of Agriculture (2021, 2022).