Meet an artist Taisia Korotkova. Taisia discusses her art projects with Art&signatures’s Irina Vernichenko.
Irina Vernichenko: please tell us about Italian and Milanese galleries
Taisia Korotkova: My experience with Italian gallerists isn’t very extensive. Since 2023 I’ve been working with C+N Canepaneri Gallery, which has two spaces – in Genoa and Milan. Italian galleries operate very professionally. For example, the role in a curator of an exhibition is crucial; curator writes the text, and collaborates with the artist. In Italy people aren’t fussy or rushed, yet exhibitions open on time. Curatorial texts are written clearly—not to show off the critic’s erudition, but to explain the artist’s work. That is, in fact, the job of the curator : to clarify the artist’s creative method.
I V : What are origins of your images?
T K : In my case, I have a lifelong project with many facets, and each smaller project adds to the larger one. I’m interested in the human beings, contemporary life, and our relationship with technology and science—what science is, how it’s used, and how it could be used. These questions concern everyone. It’s hard—or impossible—to build a single unified theory, so different projects emerge, each engaging with the theme in its own way.
I V : What is the start of a project —a theme or a discussion with a gallery?
T K : Usually it starts spontaneously, with an image. That’s how all my projects begin. For example, the exhibition “The Dark Forest” that explored a hypothetical situation, where technology was used in the wrong way: people disappeared, nature remained, along with ruins of technologies. My current projects are more optimistic—stories of humanity surviving and learning to coexist with technology and nature. I try to see the world that way.
When I visit museums and see works by old masters and contemporary artists, I sometimes have inspirations —ideas about how to use the compositional structure, color combinations, or textures in my own work, but with different imagery. It’s a double process: visual image and meaning develop simultaneously.
I V : Do you create works “from scratch,” or do you remaster a catalog of images like postmodernists?
T K : Creating images without other images is possible only if an artist lives in isolation—say, in a desert—and has no education; that’s naïve art. It is not my case. I’ve had a huge “noise in my head” since childhood—I come from a family of artists and was influenced by art history books. As a child I enjoyed looking at books with nobel ladies, dragons, and strange creatures by Bruegel and Bosch.
With professional art education you work academically, like a scientist—building on existing research rather than reinventing the wheel, trying to add something new. I understand what’s happening in art and what “gaps” I can fill.
I V: Please tell us about your family.
T K : My grandfather, Nikolai Sukoyan, studied at MARCHI and worked at I. Zholtovsky’s workshop-school as a young architect; later he headed a department at Mosproekt and, together with Y. Sheverdyayev, was the chief architect of the State Tretyakov Gallery. He built other buildings in Moscow.
My mother is a painter, my father a graphic artist; my uncle and aunt are artists as well.
I V : Is context important for an artist?
T K : It is important for me. In Milan I started to garner a better understanding how can an art project be embedded in the urban environment. I started traveling more frequently, enabling me see how contemporary art can exist outside of galleries or museums.
I V : What techniques do you work in?
T K : I mainly work in classical painting and drawing techniques. Using traditional methods and languages, I introduce new subjects. With each new series I choose the language that best matches the project’s content.
I V : How can contemporary art be integrated into the city? What are your next projects?
T K : I’m thinking about large-scale painting, a monumental project. I’m studying Mexican muralists and Soviet monumental painting—though the latter often looks hollow due to censorship.
I V : What do you like in Soviet art: the “Severe style” or Socialist realism?
T K : I love the early Avant-Garde—Suprematist projects, though it may sound strange. Urban design, avant-garde architecture, theater productions, agitprop trains—while the theme propaganda itself is distant to me, but these huge expressive structures about the future—are fascinating.
I V : Why does contemporary art have to “engage,” or surprise people today?
T K : We are surrounded by advertising and functional things, and it can be exhausting. You can’t measure a person endlessly by a criteria of practical utility. Art is “useless” —and the more useless it is, the better. Artists are privileged: they do impractical things and sometimes get paid for them. When strange projects enter urban space, people step out of the endless race and can change perspective.
I V : Is there an ethical question in contemporary art?
T K :: Of course. Art can be provocative, expand boundaries and keep the viewers alert. When art takes on an overt function, it loses quality and turns into design or social advertising. Uselessness benefits art.
I V : You wouldn’t like to decorate walls, would you?
T K : Depends how. In southern Milan there’s a beautiful church, part of the Fondazione Prada project with a Dan Flavin light installation. Is it’s colored lighting a decoration or not? It is decoration, but it’s about color and light.
I V : Conceptual artists tried to distance themselves from materiality and break with galleries?
T K : They tried—but didn’t succeed.
I V : Can architecture distant itself from materiality?
T K :. Once I saw Peter Zumthor’s drawings for the KUB Museum in Bregenz. The drawings are about light. The entire structure is designed to capture light—the initial idea is to catch something immaterial, then build boundaries around it. Good art always tries to capture something that can not be put into words.
That’s what I like about science too. In fundamental physics or mathematics, abstract concepts are discussed, it’s hard even to imagine extremely abstract concepts.
I V :Tell us about your imagery—wires and technology appear in your paintings.
A: T K : I had a series about building spacecraft and another about a nuclear physics institute. The wires are more like a web that scientists try to untangle—or perhaps entangle. Scientists told me how a reactor-accelerator works: scientists set the same parameters and get different results. I like the theme of chaos that researchers try to unravel.
I V :Tell us about your earliest work.
A: T K : I can’t—I’ve been drawing for as long as I remember, and even as a child I took it seriously.
I V : Idea of the future according to disappointments of the present—is this close to your work?
AT K :: It sounds too optimistic. Today not only the future but even the past turns out to be unpredictable.
I V :how would video game players see your art?
AT K :: I’ve heard positive feedback from virtual reality enthusiasts.
Milan, 2024
