Exit Through the Garden: Mriya Gallery Projects Primordial Confidence Amidst Wartime Fear
New Yorkers aren’t usually able to decipher the time because of the heat, as city temperatures are on average 9 degrees hotter than its lateral neighbors. The New York experience is so severely divorced from that of the natural world that our circadian rhythms beg for mercy, but hey, at least our fingers are on the pulse. Enter Mriya Gallery, the soft hand of a creative world totally alien to the mechanical drumbeat of New York.
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Even if the year-old Ukrainian art space hadn’t put on such an irascible display of animal spirit in its June exhibit, the gallery would stand out as a window into another artistic dimension. It helps that “Merging Through the Garden” at Mriya Gallery, a recent art series sponsored by Rukh Art Hub, lends its lower Manhattan real estate a level of earthen zeal.
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Ukrainians have been forced to tackle questions of mortality, homeland, and grief that most of us only have to confront in the abstract, yet resistance to annihilation often reveals the human soul at its most self-possessed. Creative abstractness thrives in the most visceral of circumstances. The Merging With the Garden series features the work of 18 Ukrainian artists grappling with terrestrial essence and wartime terror. Curated by Polina Kuznetsova, Mariia Manuilenko, and Olga Severina, the work encompasses different intra-national experiences and artistic schools, all united by a singular exasperated existential cry.
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The work of Alice Konokhova shines in its marriage of the physical and the spiritual. Her “Sinflowers” project draws visual comparisons between flowers and the human womb, evincing the fragility and pleasure of incarnation. A dutiful rejection of Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil” moral orthodoxy, Konokhova seeks the divine in the temporal being, celebrating fertility and rejuvenation in the process.
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Polina Kuznetsova’s paintings haunt as much as they inflict resplendent despair. Kuznetsova’s “Spring” shows a young woman standing on one leg in a nearly bare field littered with the frail fauna of a war-ravaged environment. Pale, but covered in a sprawling pink rain jacket, she brazenly holds up her hands to reveal self-inflicted cuts on her wrist. The beetle on her forehead is both portentous and eternal. The young woman’s journey to the natural world is not so much a physical return as an internal revelation.
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The twisted floral paintings and sculptures of Valeriia Tarasenko rest in ecstatic synesthetic excess. In “Experience Adds Wings,” the eponymous colorful wings rest in the canvas’s center, resembling both a knotted heart and pained lungs. Surrounding the wings are bare trees in violent darkness, while their feeble branches snarl over the wings. A triumphant allusion to the resilience and mortal despair of the Ukrainian experience, Tarasenko’s painting perfectly encapsulates the essence of Mriya’s “Merging Through The Garden.”
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See the full catalog of paintings here. Mriya Gallery is open daily from 11 AM to 8 PM at 101 Reade St in Manhattan. Photographs by Anastasia Mazharska – @nastyalukki on IG.
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