MARGARITA IVANOVA

Academy of Architecture and Arts 2004-2010

The theoretical platform of my artistic practice is
metamodernism and new sincerity. I define my main
method by the term "oscillation". I explore the fluctuations
between inside and outside, personal and collective,
between the system of community and the system of the
subject. I work outside the rigid boundaries of the
anthropogenic or the material.

In my works, I do not transmit meanings, but prisms, the
very optical distortions that belong to my eye and
perception. Thus, I mark the boundaries of the extremely
extended concept of medium-specificity.
In a sense, my work is a non-existent "post mortum", a
failed snapshot. The loss, the trace of the fixation itself, the
exposure of the film - this effect interests me as a
phraseological unit of the pictorial language, abstract
syntactic elements.

In my artistic practice, I start from the nature of the medium,
develop the initially modernist problem of the relationship
between figure and ground. I discard the traditional artistic
gradations between painting and background, as well as the
division into the main and the secondary - both inside and
outside, trusting the viewer to use the reason for doubt a
he pleases, to come to his own conclusion.

In my works, an active background, a pause or emptiness
are full-fledged, active elements of the pictorial language.
Following the logic of Georges Didi-Hubermann, I place
censorships as if they were the only key to understanding:
what is reality within the picture, and what is a dream? In
fact, no final conclusion is foreseen. With each new meeting
with the picture, you will have to redefine: what is really the
object of the image?
Error is an element of the structure, the system of concepts
through which we perceive the world.

My birch series is just about that.

Birch bark reminds me of human lives. Their endless chain,
one after another, someone nearby, someone above,
someone below. But wherever you are, you are always
somewhere in the middle, because no one knows exactly
where this chain begins and where it ends.