“Work in Progress” Exhibition

The process is what always lies behind an artist’s work: the preparation itself – be it research or countless sketches, drafts or notes – and, of course, the idea itself. But work is not always done for the sake of the result. In contemporary art, the process itself often becomes the work. This movement, called “process art”, originated in the 1960s in the USA and Europe. Artists working in this style are primarily focused on action.

Unlike them, Yulia Virko focuses on experience and sensations. “If viewers can leave with the feeling that they have found something of their own in these works, then something has worked out. I don’t really like it when a work needs to be explained. Everything depends on the feeling. You can’t explain why one work is good and another is bad. When you go to a museum, why does one work attract you and another doesn’t? These feelings are individual,” the artist says.

The exhibition of Yulia Virko WORK IN PROGRESS can be safely called multi-layered, and for the artist it is even experimental. The exposition is a "visual" labyrinth. Its outer perimeter, along which large-scale canvases are placed, is the very "result" of the artist's work, inside this perimeter the "process" is concentrated, in addition to which a place for awareness and recording of one's feelings is organized.

The "result" is based on a fragment of a painting series by Yulia Virko from the joint project "Your Consciousness Knows No Boundaries" (2020) with the young American artist Anton Gelfand. The series was dedicated to dreams and the unconscious. These works are easily recognizable by their rich colors, fantastic characters, and mysterious code numbers in the titles of the works, denoting the predominant colors in the work.

Virko's new works, created especially for the exhibition in Alma-Ata, are distinguished by the integrity of color and plot line, forming a small cycle called "The Promised Mirage". All sorts of shades of discreet pink are replaced by a gradient of swamp and green colors.

Water, ice floes, reflections and more water, reflections, boats, fabrics, figures of people and objects - their images are like mirages, reminding us that the viewer has already seen all this somewhere: either in everyday life and imagination, or in the artist's past works and numerous sketches.

It is here that the transition to the second component of the project with the telling title "Process" occurs. In the sketches and spreads of sketchbooks, in experimental and unfinished works, one can catch the progress of work on this or that canvas or imagine her future projects. Yulia Virko once wanted to be a portraitist and still continues to paint people. In her sketchbooks there are quite a lot of portraits, which are accompanied by strange notes and marks.

This is the very same mirror handwriting of Leonardo da Vinci. The mirror installation allows you to become part of the process, to catch the feeling of another world - the world of the artist, who even in everyday life writes "the other way around" - and, of course, to take a selfie surrounded by several author's portraits.

The process does not end there. An improvised "artist's studio" is hidden in the very center of the exhibition. The experience of staying in Alma-Ata and the analysis of the works of the master painters Valentin Tkachenko, Stepan Fedyanin, Zhanatai Shardenov and Sabur Mambeev from the collection of the A. Kasteyev State Museum of Arts formed the basis for the new canvases that Yulia Virko created right in the museum on the eve of the exhibition opening. This is a kind of research within the framework of the concept of genius loci (genius of place). The works are made in the monotype technique, which Virko has been interested in lately. The whole trick is to print an image from a metal plate onto paper

The choice of technique is not accidental, since monotype allows for textured tonal transitions, soft contours and a feeling of free brushstrokes. The effect achieved by this technique is similar to what can be achieved by painting, the main technique in which Virko works. A couple of hours before the vernissage, the artist left the studio, pausing the process. Will the works be finished, will they form the basis of a new series or individual large-scale paintings - these questions remain open. This is the mystery of Yulia Virko's endless puzzle with a real sense of work in progress.