MACHNEVA – VALLOIS

Galleries — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 11:39:13 +0000

Zhenya Machneva was born in 1988 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Trained at the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, she rapidly joined the textile department, attracted to the weaving techniques which became her main practice. Discovered by Georges-Philippe and Nathalie Vallois during the New Museum Triennale in 2018, she joined the gallery that same year. The artist, who recently settled in France, left Russia hastily. The move, initially planned in fall of 2022 for a yearlong residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris, was precipitated by the conflict with Ukraine. Since March, she has temporarily taken over the gallery’s top floor where she produces her works on a second-hand loom, procured as soon as she arrived in Paris. Three of her tapestries are currently on show in the Milk of Dreams exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Zhenya Machneva’s practice is essentially focused on traditional, handmade tapestry, an ancestral technique she constantly strives to set within a contemporary perspective, freed from the status of decorative art. The subjects she delves into encompass topical imageries: urban landscapes, wastelands of abandoned factories, obsolete machinery – references to realities she revisits and transposes into woven compositions. She gleans these shapes and subjects over the course of walks and strolls, and captures them in photographs. Most of her designs are the result of peregrinations in former soviet factories, bearing witness to a triumphant industrial past, sometimes mingled with urban landscapes found during her cross-Atlantic trips. The elements she represents share a limited temporality, a state of abandonment – they seem destined to an uncertain future, contemporary ruins she imparts with new life through her creations. These images, captured on the spot, inspire her cartoons: black and white template-compositions created to scale and bound to become tapestries of both soft and dark tones, tinged with melancholy. Her colored palette is that of a painter – the variegated threads are combined into new and vibrant colors. Handcrafted tapestry is a painstaking process in which the artist repeats the same meticulous gesture, weave after weave, forming a new image. It is impossible, during the creation of a tapestry, to see the whole of the gestating project – only the initial cartoon serves as a weaving pattern. Thus, and unlike painters who are able to embrace the whole of their compositions, the artist works blindly, glimpsing only the last 40 centimeters of the creation before it disappears, coiled in the depths of the loom. Despite a technique which seems to leave little room for improvisation, Zhenya Machneva follows her intuition, choosing a color according to her mood or her desire of the moment, letting her perception of the instant act as a sensitive guide to her gestures and freely interpreting the original black and white score. She imbues her initially cold and impersonal subjects with her own emotions, infuses them with her imagination. This double incarnation of the artist, immerging her sensitive being both in her technique and in her subjects, reveals an unexpected liveliness. Echoing the titles, the elements depicted – buildings or inert machines – are put in motion (Fallen), express emotions (Cry), or take on a human (Baby, Hermit) or animal (A Dog) aspect. Displaying a deep empathy for what we disregard or forget, Zhenya Machneva sublimates the forsaken – as demonstrated by the exhibition name, The Minor Sublimation, and invites us to delicately embrace a new perspective on the fallow lands of our world. Marie Gautier

MACHNEVA – VALLOIS

Galleries — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 14:03:49 +0000

Zhenya Machneva was born in 1988 in Leningrad, a Soviet city whose name existed between 1924 and 1991, also known as St. Petersburg. From the beginning there is the story of a disappearance, of a ghost. During her studies at the Stieglitz State Academy of Art and Design, Zhenya Machneva chose to train in the textile department. She is immediately struck and seduced by weaving techniques. At this time, she is not yet free of the subjects she wishes to weave, the tapestry is confined to a strictly decorative function. A function and a role that she will shift when she starts working alone in her studio.On two manual looms, she creates tapestries representing industrial landscapes, factories emptied of their workers, useless machines, patterns and colors. Why would you try to represent by hand a heritage that no one seems to care about anymore? The artist finds in it a family history, as well as the fallen fantasy of an era. She points out that “the Soviet industrial period has enjoyed great glory, but now what we can see are just collapsed dreams.It seems important to me to collect different objects and different landscapes in the process of disappearing.” Like an archaeologist from the Soviet industrial era, Zhenya Machneva begins by visiting the factory where her grandfather worked. On site, the machines appear to her as sculptures, organisms and autonomous entities. She needs to «touch her subject.» Before weaving, she sets off to explore deserted factories, abandoned sheds, wastelands turned into landfills. On site, she photographs what she calls «patterns.» The collection of images will give rise to extremely graphic drawings rendered in black and white. The drawings are the sketches from which she will implement the tapestries. Zhenya Machneva creates a contrast between subject and technique. The steel is made visible by cotton, the rate of work at the factory gives way to slowness, while the weight, coldness and rigidity of the buildings are soft and subtle in the weaving. The black and white drawings are transformed into colorful tapestries. Colors are intuitively chosen.

Zhenya Machneva wants to maintain a part of improvisation within a laborious manual process. “I hope that you can feel my energy through the works.” The choice of tapestry is physical. Zhenya Machneva gives the technique an organic dimension to which it is intimately attached. Sitting in front of the loom, the artist tirelessly repeats the same gestures to generate successive frames. Repetition, slowness and loneliness are part of a meditative state in which each cotton thread becomes a mantra. A gestural repetition that echoes that once applied by workers, active in these factories that today are ghosts. The choice of tapestry is also political. If you look at the history of art, tapestry is a medium.

It has an authoritarian, timeless, sensory aspect. Through the thread and the loom, Zhenya Machneva represents the Soviet industrial heritage that has become invisible and unproductive. The motifs, machines and buildings are the archives of a bygone era, a time when industrialization and the figure of the worker were over-glorified. A vanished era of which barely visible ghosts remain. It is then for the artist to embody this heritage to give it a new existence.The making of tapestries is a physical incarnation, but also metaphorical. She pays particular attention to patterns, or to the details of machines whose zoomorphism or anthropomorphism she accentuates. She then plays with the pareidolia, which brings out familiar faces, skulls and other forms.The artist thus engages a new reading of the woven motifs by opening a fictional space. Through her weft threads and her chain threads, Zhenya Machneva awakens ghosts, revives and makes the poetry of sleeping landscapes palpable.

Julie Crenn

Galleries in Paris » Zhenya Machneva

MACHNEVA – VALLOIS

MACHNEVA – VALLOIS