The exhibition of Marina Koldobskaya includes several series of pictorial works united by the artist’s general tendency to push the envelope of traditional painting. By exposing professional devices to the maximum, the artist removes, layer by layer, the multi-millennium practice of art history, getting to the essentials of the protolanguage of art. At the author’s pleasure, large-scale canvases become half cave roofs of the Paleolithic Age, half a page from the children drawing book: the sacral territory of expression. From the pictures, we are closely observed by packs of predators that pulled their prey to pieces and are now drunk with blood flows, and postcard flowers lost their decorative aspect and turned into the monsters that devour with their bud’s trap the viewer who passes by. Expressive images-totems are plain to everybody, much like everybody is familiar with the emotions common to a human and an animal: fury, lust, thirst and fear.

Andrew Sakov, art historian