Moscow-born artist Margarita Gluzberg works across painting, drawing, photography, performance, installation, and sound. Situating biographical details within wider perspectives on migration and history, Gluzberg's practice brings to light the nuanced tensions between truth and fiction, and the personal and popular.
Read MoreGluzberg emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1979. She completed a BA Fine Art at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford in 1990. In 2012, she completed her MA Painting at the Royal College of Art in London.
Since 2018, Gluzberg has taught as a Senior Lecturer at the Royal Academy Schools, London. She has also guest lectured at Goldsmiths' College and Slade School of Fine Art, London; Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn; Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg; and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
Gluzberg examines ideas around history, biography, memory, and culture in relation to contemporary existence. With an interdisciplinary practice that encompasses drawing, performance, video, and photography, Gluzberg creates highly charged installations that contextualise the artist's biographical history within broader cultural references, while exploring different material processes.
Early Works
In her early practice, Gluzberg used drawing as a tool to explore nostalgia and popular culture. For her 2007 exhibition, Funk of Terror into Psychic Bricks at Paradise Row in London, the artist presented a series of large-scale pencil drawings that honed in on 1950s Western cultural iconography, including pin-up girls, boxers, and record players.
On Gluzberg's use of the heart motif in Funk of Terror, Sam Thorne wrote for Frieze: 'The heart is preserved as a notion, but its materiality is denied-love is signified by something very superficial. Gluzberg's drawings pinpoint this very Postmodern kind of desire, striving for a liminal space in which metaphor and materiality are confused.'
In Avenue des Gobelins (2012), Gluzberg's exhibition at Paradise Row, the artist presented a suite of new photographs, slide projections on graphite, and a video projection. Drawing its title from the early French photographer Eugène Atget's images of Parisian shop windows, Avenue des Gobelins explored experimental analogue film developing techniques in a manner akin to the Surrealists, exposing the film multiple times to result in abstracted, layered images.
In the black and white photograph The Consumystic IV (handbag and spheres) (2011), Gluzberg captures an elaborate window display featuring handbags on sculptural spherical plinths. The 35mm slide projection series 'The Consumystic' (2011) featured 80 slides that included shots of beautiful women superimposed on images of shop interiors and displays, evoking ideas of material desire, voyeurism, and the allure of ritualised consumption.
For her 2019 solo exhibition In Paradise at Pushkin House in London, Gluzberg presented a new series of large-scale drawings suspended from metal bars, framed by the artist as 'cinema experiments'. Framing parallels between Gluzberg's move to the West during her childhood in 1979, and Andrei Tarkovsky's classic science fiction film Stalker (1979), the artist considers the shared themes of environmental politics, migration, memory, existentialism, and the structure of time in film.
Gluzberg produces her drawings through projection: film is projected onto the paper, and the artist records the moving image through mark-making with graphite. The resulting abstracted outcomes reflect the visual narrative of the film, and the artist's body engaged in the physical act of drawing. With several of the works mirroring the scale of the viewer's body, Gluzberg's works project a physical presence, and demonstrate an approach to drawing as a sculptural or physical process.
On Gluzberg's drawings at Pushkin House, curator Dominik Czechowski wrote that they 'indexed [a] completely different formal language that evokes the iconography of the late 70s Russian culture, now reachable through the technologically aided memory – the Internet, films, and photographs.'
Gluzberg has also worked within the realm of performance. Select performances and live works include Actual Song of the Canary Bird, commissioned by Artangel for SLOW DANS, London (2020); КОСТИ, Rock On Bones at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill (2016); and Captive Bird Society at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2014).
In 2016, Gluzberg was the recipient of the Wellcome Trust Arts Award. In 2004, she received a Wingate Scholarship in Fine Art from the British School at Rome.
Gluzberg has presented in solo and group exhibitions in the U.K. and Europe.
Solo exhibitions include Karsten Schubert (2022); In Paradise, Pushkin House, London (2019); For Children, Not For Children, Filet, London (2018); Avenue des Gobelins, Paradise Row, London (2011).
Group exhibitions include Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2022); #100NHSRooms, Vital Arts, London (2020); Me, Myself and I, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London (2020).
Margarita Gluzberg's website can be found here, and her Instagram can be found here.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2022
