Crea Cantieri del Contemporaneo is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition “LIMBO”, the first solo exhibition in Venice by the artist Katerina Kovaleva.
In “Limbo” the artist approaches and develops one of the most powerful themes in Western tradition: waiting, evoked in an emblematic way by the myth of Penelope, the faithful and at the same time shrewd wife of Ulysses. This myth, which embodies waiting as an existential and not only temporal condition, is explored by Katerina Kovaleva in her exhibition “Limbo”, a place/non-place where suspended time is prolonged indefinitely, without the promise of resolution. Kovaleva’s “limbo” thus becomes a pregnant metaphor for all those expectations that are not fulfilled, for those lives in precarious balance between aspiration and reality.
The artist’s intervention thus gives life to a real game of mirrors where the myth, as an urgency to explain reality, and the latter chase each other endlessly.
In her observation, the artist also engages with other narratives and the representations that these have had in the history of art. In particular, the myth of the Rape of Europa, a theme dear to many artists belonging to different eras, and therefore different pictorial expressions and geographical areas. Among the most famous interpretations are those of Giambattista Tiepolo and Titian, whose iconographies Kovaleva refers to in the Venetian spaces.
Her installation not only takes up its symbolic meaning, linked to the idea of ​​a drastic uprooting and a spatial-temporal delocalization, but amplifies it with further symbolic values ​​linked to the themes of contemporaneity.
The rooms of CREA thus become particular "waiting rooms" but at the same time "Landing Zones", where, alongside two-dimensional and video works, the artist intervenes in an installation manner of great impact by making enormous painted parachutes "float" and "land", a tool and metaphor of her research in eternal balance and equilibrium between memory, waiting and the search for a solution in the disorder of contemporary "Limbo".
Katerina Kovaleva was born in Moscow. After completing art high school, she continued her studies at the Art Institute (MVPKhU) and the Moscow Polygraphic Institute, graduating with honors in 1989.
She has worked in the field of book graphics and interior design; she is the author of a series of mosaic works in Moscow, New York and Groningen.
She loves to experiment using different materials, often turning to the collage technique that she applies both in painting and graphics.
In 2017 she participated in the project Antarctic Biennale with an album of drawings “Antarctic Diary”, exhibited for the first time on board the oceanographic vessel “Sergei Vavilov” during the period in which it was in the waters of the Drake Passage; the same work was subsequently exhibited at the 57th Venice International Art Biennale. In 2018, the MMOMA in Moscow hosted a major retrospective exhibition of hers entitled “The Path of Memory”. At the heart of Kovaleva’s works is the analysis of memory as a phenomenon, its connections with the history of the country and of the individual, making use of archive materials, documents and objects from the past. The theme “History of pathologies. The right to rest” was the heart of her artistic research for an exhibition held in 2012 at the Rosfoto Museum in St. Petersburg. The project was dedicated to the holidays that were spent in sanatoriums in the Soviet era, to the theme of oblivion and the decline of civilizations. In 2023, the Gulag History Museum in Moscow hosted the project “Waiting Zone”, dedicated to the theme of waiting in the context of historical events. Part of it will be presented at the “Limbo” exhibition scheduled at CREA Cantieri del Contemporaneo in Venice. The installation “In case of rain. Waiting Zone” is exhibited at the “Personal Structures” exhibition at Palazzo Bembo.
Katerina Kovaleva has taken part in over 80 artistic projects, regularly participating in art fairs, her works are present in private and state collections in Russia, as well as abroad.
The exhibition benefits from the scientific contribution and texts of the author, publisher and former Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Moscow Olga Strada and of Andrej Kurilkin publisher, director of InLiberty and culturologist, as well as the precious support of Vin d’honneur Tenuta AMADIO.