13 March - 24 March 2024
PRIVATE VIEW: 12 March, 6-9 pm, Cromwell Place, SW7 2JE
Untitled, Porcelain, 45 x 45 cm, 2023-2024
A bright new international talent is bringing her work to London, where she will be launching her first UK exhibition at ART4 in Cromwell Place, South Kensington in the gallery's room 11. The exhibition, Restoration of Time, will take place between the 12th of March, 2024, and is on view until the 24th.
Liza Bobkova grew up in Soviet Russia, near the border with Latvia. The artist graduated in St. Petersburg from the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, Russia’s oldest design school. A city sparse in established museums or galleries, her style developed instead in the milieu of its lively underground micro-spaces. Her work favours the pursuit of expression over direct message, moving flexibility between the approach and material best suited to her vision and chosen theme.
Bobkova’s work seeks to explore the new shape of communication in the 21st century. The artist favours the creative use of material and medium, finding ways to re-express our familiar forms of communication. Through her work Bobkova encourages a shift in perspective. She unveils the texture of a message or conversation in the new context of bold materials like metal and glass, through total installation or an act of performance. From videographic portraiture in Presence Detection Methods (2022), to engravings on window panes in There Were 10 Sunny Days in January (2019) or the scintillating wire sculptures of Period of Oscillation (2016), her work is ambiguous and often surprising, whereby the invisible aesthetic properties of an ordinary message become its defining features.
In 2023 Bobkova moved from Russia to London, where she opened ART4, London’s newest contemporary art gallery. For Bobkova, ART4 represents a chance to participate in the rich London market, an ecosystem of art and creativity on a scale that is new to the artist. She has been inspired by the work of her husband and gallery’s co-founder Igor Markin, the founder of ART4 museum - Moscow’s largest private contemporary art space. The curation of ART4 gallery will echo Bobkova’s love of raw materials and specialised craftsmanship (Bobkova herself spent seventeen years as an artisan blacksmith), favouring artists that use classic earth materials to produce unfamiliar, contemporary art. There are two exhibitions planned for the spring, and three for the autumn alongside the gallery’s participation at international art fairs.
Bobkova’s new exhibition, Restoration of Time, continues her study on material and communication. It features two brand-new series of sculptural works, one in bronze and the other in porcelain. The bronze series features 30 etched and polished plaques. The porcelain features 18 asymmetric porcelain squares alongside a porcelain house of cards.
Bobkova uses these materials to explore our relationship with the linear progression of time. With both metal and ceramics, the process of craftsmanship is often arduous: porcelain hand-rolled paper thin and carefully fired to produce delicate sheets; bronze painstakingly engraved with abstract images transcribed from the sound waves of digital voice notes. They maintain an air of fragility distinct from their rugged canvas, just as the porcelain house of cards instils an anxiety reflective of the unstable nature of the present moment. The artwork in both materials is indirect, and the interpretive work of the viewer plays a central role in its messaging. Their minimalist installation encourages the contemplation of these deceptively simple pieces.
‘I am glad that I did not stop at the direction that the academy gave me. Artists with a classical education often stop at the edge of Method… The most important thing is that we worked with real materials in our hands from the first days. This is the reason why I boldly paint sand in rainbow colours, paint fabrics, shoot films, do performances, polish and weld metal, sew shirts with my mom, create jewellery. I am free to explore different creative paths and extremely happy about it.’ Liza Bobkova
‘I am delighted to support Liza in this new endeavour. I believe that she is a charismatic artist and curator who can develop a unique curatorial vision that would involve not only more diverse types of art in terms of materials used, but a diverse set of international artists.’
Igor Markin, Co-Founder
The exhibition will be on view in Cromwell Place’s eleventh room from 13 March to 24 March 2024.
For more information:
ART4,
Cromwell Place,
4 Cromwell Pl,
South Kensington,
London SW7 2JE
Opening times:
Wednesday — Saturday: 11.00am — 7.00pm
Sunday: 11.00am — 4.00pm
Press Contact:
Christina Ioannou
CCIcomms LTD
+447447997215
NOTES TO EDITORS
About ART4:
ART4 UK is London’s newest contemporary art gallery, presenting emerging, international artists to the London art scene. The project is directed by artist Liza Bobkova, who will also spearhead the curatorial programme. Bobkova aspires to foster a multidisciplinary exhibition programme. For its curatorial direction, the gallery will focus on work that re-imagines raw, tactile material in surprising new shapes and forms, favouring creatives with a technical speciality present in the finished work. In 2024 a series of shows will each introduce a new contemporary artist - both established favourites, and young up-and-comers. The gallery space is located at Cromwell Place in South Kensington, London.
Liza Bobkova Bio:
Liza Bobkova (b. 1987, Ostrov, Russia) is Director of ART4 gallery, as well as a multidisciplinary contemporary artist who works with total installation, sculpture, video and drawing to explore how individuals are socialised in the modern world.
Liza graduated from the Artistic Metalworking Department of St Petersburg’s Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design (2011), applying the tools of a classical art education to create bold experiments with materials including metal, porcelain, fabric, glass, photography and video. Immediately after graduating, disillusioned with Russia’s education and curatorial system, she left the contemporary art world to work as a blacksmith, actively resuming her career as an artist in 2016. Liza was a guest lecturer on the master’s programme at the Stieglitz Academy, where she created a contemporary art library to give students access to up-to-date publications on the art of today. When the war in Ukraine began, Liza left her job and the studio where she had worked for 17 years. In 2022 she moved to Moscow, where she launched the Tupik contemporary art fair at Art4 Museum. Since late 2023 she has been based in London.