About
Bio
Marika Kandelaki is a Georgian artist from New York, who currently lives and works between NYC and Mali Losinj, Croatia. Marika is a multidisciplinary artist who mainly explores painting, sculpture, textiles design, costume design and performance. She also works in video, writes and designs textiles. Marika is a founder of Moonshake Studio, a textile design and branding company and is a cofounder of art driven clothing brand Untitled in Motion.
Kandelaki has exhibited at venues that include: Losinj Museum, Osor, Croatia; ULUPUH Gallery, Zagreb, Croatia; Stellar Projects, New York, NY; Movement Theater, Tbilisi, Georgia; Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany; Art in General, New York, NY; Moma PS1, Long Island City, NY; P!, New York, NY; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Queens Museum, Queens, NY; The Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, Sherbrooke, Canada; and Bridge Gallery, New York, NY. Her work has been reviewed in publications that include Whitewall Art, frieze, Guardian, Art Practical, Wire Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. Additionally, she has contributed to publications such as The Third Rail and Notes: on Value; Fuse Magazine.
Work Process
Targeting the structural angles of historical narratives, Marika Kandelaki explores representation via a speculative formalism. In her paintings the representation of space is always a philosophical question; it is a question of matter and space, of being and void. Kandelaki’s process is based on a physical dissection of architectural forms and historical symbols of female representation, which in turn are combined and confronted with narratives of femininity, always in the effort of exposing a deeper irony within monumentality and representation.
Marika’s recent clay sculptures depict figureheads of beings which are familiar yet alien. The body is represented as the manifestation of being and the materialization of contingency. These figures represent feminine characters which are simultaneously pre-and-post-historical; they are archaeological excavations of woman that is not. There is a persistent question which Marika asks in her work: Is there a femininity beyond identity, beyond patriarchal dichotomy?
Marika Kandelaki's bodies are fragmented: the heads are bent, the faces are reduced to the lines of the eyes and nose, the limbs are sometimes assembled and sometimes disassembled, but always interdependent. It is a metaphorical body: as a whole it is read like rationality that gives reason and meaning to everything, puts it in order and brings peace; the broken body is a metaphor of the unconscious which, with its hidden messages, feelings and dreams, brings restlessness into reality by adapting it to one's own desires and hopes. In the interaction of the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the sensitive, a new world emerges in which space and time are not unambiguous. Space is fluid, it knows no physical limits and laws of matter. Time is infinite - in the present the past and the future meet, and the moment is a set of past assignments and future possibilities. In this paradox of infinite moment and fluid space live the humanoid figures of Marika's sculptures and paintings. These can be beings from outer space. Or from the human imagination. Mythological beings, goddesses and ghosts; or mental states. Fragmentation. Multiplicity of personality. Aren’t we all made up of different public and private roles, with that personal and intimate self bent between an unspeakable and inexpressible unconscious?