Anna Parkina

June 2013

Anna Parkina’s collages draw from mass-media imagery, print and abstract geometry, reconfiguring everyday images, vintage prints and her own colorful marks to suggestive and mysterious effect. Whether working with images of cars, suburban houses, snow-laden branches, lightbulbs, a man reading a newspaper or a couple kissing, Parkina’s clever combinations draw nuanced meanings and significances out of her subjects.

Born 1979 and raised in the Soviet Union, Parkina’s works play with the aesthetic feel of Constructivism and Soviet propaganda. So too do they evoke a less well-known avant-garde group of writers and poets from the 1920s called the Union of Real Art (OBERIU), who were fascinated with the absurd, the anarchic and with breaking down constructs of meaning by combining incompatible words. Parkina’s works suggest these ideas through her own unique visual language, deftly employed to contemplate the anxieties of today.

Anna Parkina lives and works in Moscow. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Only a Sleeping Person Doesn’t Blink’, Wilkinson Gallery (2013), ‘Sacred Ambush is full of Parrots Screaming’ (Two person show with Andrew Gilbert), SVIT Praha, Prague (2011), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, USA (2011), ‘Egg in the Fist’, Wilkinson Gallery, London (2010), ‘The ticket is for today’, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea (2010) and ‘Nests’, Gladstone Gallery, New York. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Perspectives on Collage’, The Photographers’ Gallery, London (until 7 April 2013), ‘Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union’, Saatchi Gallery, London, and ‘Things, Words, Consequences’, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2012).