Marina Pcheliakova

Centered on large-scale painting, the practice explores existential questions of irreversibility, repetition, and the human experience of living with what cannot be changed. Bright colours and deliberately naïve imagery create a visual language in which lightness coexists with the complexity of these themes.

LAMI-GENOLINI ARTIST RESIDENCY

During my residency at the historic Lami-Genolini villa in Erba, I worked with the family archive and the history of the place. I created a series of large-scale paintings inspired by the house, its generations and the stories connected to it, exploring how places, memories and family history shape who we become.

dead flower
solo exhibition, 11.12 gallery, moscow, 2025

The project explores time and its irreversibility as a fundamental part of human existence. We move through life while constantly losing it, unable to stop, control, or turn back time. The works follow the course of a human life through different stages and draw on personal and family archives, childhood drawings, and fragments of lived experience. Throughout the exhibition, a living flower placed in the space slowly withered, becoming a physical measure of passing time. By the end of the exhibition, it remained as a dead flower, preserving the beauty of a form that had changed.

This series brings together stories about death, irreversibility and the emptiness that can follow the loss of possibility. Animal figures appear throughout the works as part of these stories, introducing a deliberately naïve and almost fairy-tale-like language. Each painting presents a separate scene, shaped like an image from a kind and familiar story, while carrying an underlying sense of loss and the impossibility of changing what has already happened. The contrast allows difficult subjects to be approached through a visual language that feels simple, familiar and almost comforting.

SEPARATION
solo exhibition, cube.moscow, 2023

The project examines the tension between individuality and the structures we exist within. Society, intimate relationships and life with a partner shape not only our behaviour, but also the boundaries of our desires, gradually creating a sense of where the self ends and the other begins. The exhibition considers the possibility of separation as an uncertain and perhaps impossible state: if our identity is formed through relationships and social structures, can we ever fully exist outside of them? Even the idea of being unique may already be shaped by the very rules we believe we are resisting.

A selection of works from 2023–2024 explores the gap between the circumstances of our birth and the environments that shape us as we grow. The works consider the places, social structures and larger systems we return to, and how these environments gradually become part of our understanding of ourselves. The project moves from the intimate space of family and close relationships towards broader social and political structures, asking how much of what we become is shaped by the world we enter, and what happens when that world is oppressive, destructive or impossible to escape.