In August, 2021 Liza Bobkova presented her new works at her Alma Mater, Stieglitz Museum of Applied Arts, St.Petersburg. This exhibition comprises several exposition genres at once – an appealing report of the Stieglitz Academy graduate and a workshop, an academic play; a monologue performance at a psychoanalytic couch and a social visionary lab.
Making up existential and sensuous stories of watercolors, grids, orbs and figures as artfully as ensuring the elegance of visual metaphors, this time Lisa Bobkova seems to have switched off her narrative motive generator – and placed a diptych based on polysemic incomplete shapes. The extensive piece made of many elements, instantly seen as her characteristic feature, and utterly delicate rhythmic compositions in drawing ink present Lisa’s excellent mastery, which constitutes the true subject of the statement, admiration and criticism at any academic parade. In infinite similarities and uniqueness of color sports, their almost (!) even series and vibrations of accurately measured and weirdly interjecting cadenced configurations one will see a concentration of the East and the West, Filonov-like dedication of a trained perfectionist artisan, liable to God alone. Yet, there is this gesture straightforwardness that makes the viewer wonder if these really are the art skills people nowadays contend in. Unconditional and yet unqualifiable – maybe even unrecognizable – art is as a mute gratitude the artist addresses to her Alma Mater, a powerful material surge for her new artmates to watch and discuss.
Seamless integration with the context – and at the same time a stringent demand to the audience that reverberates as a hammer blow: see the emotional drama and become a part of it!
Even out of apparent narrations, Liza Bobkova drags us into the world of uncomfortable attempts of blending a gesture, a word, a spot, a sound, and a sense with hope. Shifting your glance from this view seems impossible, and leaving means making a decision.
This is attraction of a morbid power.
Does this light-weight giant of steel tell a story of dreams, referring to a kite Lisa used to love so much as a child? Or is it that frozen gesture of the author that comes to its rattling life only when we are away?
What are black grey, red and white volumes behind the wall sigh or silently scream about? Obstacles and phantasms of love. Weaknesses and the past. Melancholy and salvation through shapes. Seaside waves of the void. Gender transitions and adventures. Bondages, trauma and fate. Shounds and zounds, irony, trouble and blissfulness. But don’t trust my free and easy description as it is pathetic. Take you time, read and watch on your own. Set yourself agog. Although, whenever Post-Conceptual art coalesces with Minimalism, emotional stress is accompanied with social insecurity. And from this perspective finely intoned images all of a sudden cool down to a choreographic record of a frozen surrealistic dance performed by civilized Homo sapiens, who fundamentally live in order.
