And Your End Will Come Sculpture

Aleksandra Marinova is a Bulgarian interdisciplinary artist born in Cyprus, Limassol in 1998. She is currently based in Bulgaria/UK. She attended the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland (2016-2019). 'My practice is the sharply bipolar division of the representational and the non-representational. I am concerned with the human subject and the ways in which contemporary art engages with- and points at it, metaphorically and literally. It is no secret that since the departure of postmodern and conceptual artistic practices, the artworld is experiencing a state of disturbance, confusion, uncertainty - the material identity of the aesthetic object is 'unfixed' - '...the end of medium specificity, which has given way in artistic practice to a mobile, variable, or indeterminate relation between the terms of a work and its material means. It is no longer understood necessarily to take only one form - indeed, it may not require a concrete form of any kind.' (Jeffrey Weiss, Artforum, March 2012). Finding myself a practitioner existing in that turmoil, I am constantly testing the conditions on which artmaking operates and trying to identify current problems with it: is painting still alive? Haven't we all seen what painting can achieve, from the brilliance and technical proficiency of Michelangelo, to Kandinsky's minimalism? Is nostalgia to a medium and expression what keeps painting alive in the 21st century? What defines the status of the art object after the ready-made? I am nostalgic, therefore I still paint. And I will always paint; even if the process is reduced to a recycling of previous aesthetic discoveries. In my paintings I am often torn between the smooth, perfect, almost superficial-like finish and the perverse three-dimensionality that paint affords. I often find myself wanting to respond to works of artists who speak to me, and offer a contemporary take on their subjects - such as Rodin, Tamara de Lempicka, Mark Rothko, Bas Jan Ader, Martin Creed, Robert Montgomery, Walker and Walker. After all, all I can do as a practitioner in the 21st century is to re-imagine, re-construct, re-think already existing concepts. I experiment with neon, performance and video performance. I write about art and am interested in systems of art, art theory, psychology, fetishism. For further information, you may contact me at alexandra.m2909@gmail.com