Date & Location
Fall, 2010
Kyiv, Ukraine
Fall, 2010
Kyiv, Ukraine
Series of more than 200 plaster sculptures-casts of Maria Kulikovska's body. First sculptures from this series were made in fall of 2010. The sculptures and their images are actively used in artist's installations and actions, which are organized within the framework of the project «Flowers of Democracy» since 2015.
«Pysanky» is a series of more than 200 plaster sculptures-molds of Maria Kulikovska's body. First sculptures from the series «Pysanky» were made in fall of 2010. They were created as the sculptural elements of the arch-shaped installation, which was exhibited at Bottega Gallery in Kyiv, and at the group exhibition at Modern Art Research Institute in Kyiv. The plaster sculptures and their images are actively used in artist's installations and actions, which have been organized within the framework of the project «Flowers of Democracy» since 2015.
For the creation of plaster molds Maria Kulikovska sought help from her university's professor. A study of the casting technique ended with a conflict. A university's conditions with the taboo themes and conflictual reactions to the images of woman's body and its separate parts became, for Maria Kulikovska, the beginning of work with the issues of women's position in the art and society. The copies of Kulikovska's body are a kind of self-objectification. The copies of Kulikovska's body are the way to get rid of objectification by patriarchal society. The reactions at the exhibitions were also controversial and critical.
«Pysanky are an Ukrainian Easter eggs, usually decorated by Ukrainian women, – curator Galyna Sklyarenko commented. – This arch-shaped installation, which is decorated with a multitude of plaster pink vaginas, looks like a shining «gateway to the sky». At first glance, of course. We may see a female genital only after coming closer to it. The artist plays with archaic rituals, which are symbolized a birth, death, love, taboo, where the gate (vagina) is a way to «alternate dimension». The sculptural projects by Maria Kulikovska are on the border between technological and nature, accidental and structural. They are the way to research the artist's own biopsychology and its materialization. These studies are often radical, but their radicalism is isolated from society and is about individual self-perception, expanding the borders of human's experience as art can do it better»."
In November-December 2020, Maria Kulikovska in collaboration with Oleh Vinnichenko, and with the support of School of Political Performance and Gallery-Shelter GARAGE33, recreated the arch-shaped installation with «pysanky» specially for the exhibition «From Action to Performative Sculpture: Maria Kulikovska», which was held at Shcherbenko Art Centre.
