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Tatiana
Antoshina : Museum of a Woman |
White Space Gallery is pleased to present the works of Tatiana Antoshina, one of the most challenging and provocative of woman artists working in Russia today. Antoshina is an artist who actively explores and playfully subverts gender roles in her art practice and this will be the first London exhibition of these works. The exhibition will include the photographic series Museum of a Woman, a parodic view of classical paintings, alongside her porcelain portraits/sculptures which were featured in After the Wall (Moderna Museet, 1998) and depict the Russian performance artists, Alexander Brenner and Oleg Kulik. The highlight of this exhibition will be her new photographic series Europe (2002/4) in which among other images, Europe is portrayed as a nude elderly woman breast-feeding the infamous cloned sheep Dolly. Antoshina's Museum of a Woman is as much a reaction to the newfound Russian democracy as to the persistence of ‘artistic’ boy’s clubs, despite the increasing recognition of a history of great woman artists from Russia inside and outside the country. Antoshina's identity as an artist is based on a critical awareness of her position as a woman artist in this situation. Antoshina depicts Woman, who is usually considered the sexual object of a male gaze, as a remodelled form of active subject, reversing the roles normally assigned to women in classical works. Instead of the female nudes pictured by Ingres in his Turkish baths, Antoshina represents an ensemble of seductive naked men. Similarly, in her new project Europe, she is portraying a group of young men sitting in homage to an elderly woman, whose body and actions reveal her authority, dignity and experience. The model for these works is Pani Bronya, aged 73. In her new works, Bronya's elderly nude figure becomes a mythic representation for an ageing Europe, where today the proportion of elderly people in the population is increasing despite society's apparent fear of ageing and its fascination with youth. In her similarly ‘ironic monuments to Kulik and Brenner’ Antoshina freezes their ephemeral and radical performance acts in the traditional technique of porcelain, a medium over-identified with applied female crafts. This is typical of Antoshina’s use of varying media and materials and knowingly references both Jeff Koons and Judy Chicago's use of the same media, while offering her own very unique monuments to Russia's art history. Tatiana Antoshina
was born in 1959 in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Active since early nineties,
Tatiana Antoshina has been included in numerous international exhibitions,
including "After the Wall", Moderna Muzeet, Stockholm in 1998,
"Art against Geography", The State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg
in 2000, "Women In Art", Bergen Museum of Art and Science, New
Jersey in 2001, "Woman in Russian Art", State Tretyakov Gallery,
Moscow in 2002; "?? ??????! RUSSISCHE KUNST HEUTE", The Kunsthalle
Baden-Baden in 2004. Major solo exhibitions have included "Museum
of Woman", Guelman Gallery, Moscow in 1997;
White
Space Gallery St Peter's, Vere Street (off Oxford Street), London W1G
ODQ. Tube: Bond Street
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Tatiana
Antoshina : Museum of a Woman 
