Gretchen Lawrence and Margaret Tashkova

For this Online Viewing Room Galerina presents a new series of abstract paintings on unstretched canvases together with a sculpture by Gretchen Lawerence and Margaret Tashkova. Lawrence’s work is a study in reconstruction. The abstract paintings hide references to post-Soviet architecture in the midst of restructuring from the state of communism to capitalism. Legendary buildings and sites carry the aura of abandonment of history and the clashes of the aesthetics. Growing up as the first generation after the fall of the USSR, these sites have become a playground of endless opportunities.

Lawrence plays with subcultures and movements by delocalizing sounds, objects, clothes or movements. The paintings are on unstretched and unprepped canvases – something that has often signified protest art. Here the visual history can be traced back to Russian Revolutionary art and posters from early 20th century. The overlap is not only in form but also subject matter. Take El Lissitzky’s Prouns for example – the inspiration behind the work was drawn from architecture rather than art history itself, in the search for novelty. Lawrence carries a similar agenda of constructing based on a variety of references, informed by the contemporary metropolitan reality.

The paintings can be moved around, rolled up, nailed into walls. Objectifying the work and yet again, not giving away or into what it is supposed to be – creating an isotype of her own. The materiality of the abstraction is brought into a form through sculpture, working with found objects and metal, the Swan rests with her head down.

Somewhere between the 70’s and 80’s there was a cultural shift in the relationship between pop and avantgarde.  Andres Härm writes about the birth of band as a radical format within arts starting with Throbbing Gristle’s first live performance during the scandalous COUM Transmissions exhibition at ICA, London in 1976. Lawrence’s music and performances tie into her visual practice and inform each other. Using loops and references to pop, there is no cultural hierarchy. If the Frankfurt school saw pop culture as a tool of manipulation and control, since Stuart Hall and Mark Fisher, the relationship between the cultural and sociological has been redefined. Bringing nostalgia into the cycles of production seems incredibly important here. The thoughts are not just only direct and critical towards the pasts of our own, the dichotomy between capitalist and communist but the cycles of cultural production and how they adapt to ideology.

Lineup (Static/2023), 2024 has КОДУМАА written on it in Cyrillic script, the letters read as an Estonian word Kodumaa when written in Latin alphabet. ЭСТИМА КОДУМА [EESTIMAA;KODUMAA] translating into Estonia, Homeland was a tag across the city of Tallinn in early 2000s, the local Russian speaking population has been continuously scrutinised since the fall of USSR. The same visual signifier was used by an Estonian artist Leonhard Lapin for the word freedom ВАБАДУС [VABADUS] in 1989 during the Soviet Occupation. 

These symbols in Lawrence’s work play with the signified. Across the work the same letters, words and visuals change their power and what they stand for. A continuous change through time, nations, people and names. Identity and ideology.