Playground | Exhibition in the 24th Nidbach Series

In her first solo exhibition, Anastasia Nikulina embarks on a journey in early 16th-century Flanders to one of the fathers of Western painting, Netherlandish artist Hieronymus Bosch. A large triptych is installed in the interior space, inspired by Bosch’s masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-04). Nikulina uses a composition similar to that of the original painting: three panels in a dark frame bearing a gold band, connected to each other by means of hinges. It is a painting that acts like an installation.

The painting’s themes and reading mode, from left to right, were preserved as in the original, but unlike it—the left panel does not depict the Garden of Eden and the creation of Adam and Eve, but a different Genesis story—the Genesis of the Big Bang and of scientific (and pseudo-scientific) theories. The central panel features the garden of earthly delights, consisting of representations of the present, culled from the web and heaped on the canvas. Like the Flemish painting, here too, we are concerned with a painterly collage, and as in the original, it is made from information gathered in the form of sketches, arranged directly on the canvas.

Nikulina keeps the original composition, but replaces the figures, distorts them, and disrupts the technique. In her work, the abstract and the figurative, “bad” painting and “good” painting, come together; familiar images from the history of classical Western art are juxtaposed with internet images from popular culture. And there is also text—text that asks to be read or perhaps to be read only formally and not literally; a text that is a painting. The right panel portrays hell—is this a prophecy about hell on earth, or just a warning?

Nikulina’s garden of delights is painting itself. She responds to all its demands, serves it faithfully, and devotes herself to its every whim. The syntax is partly familiar and partly associative, meaningless, obscure. The existence of these two qualities side by side is possible only in painting.

Tsuki Garbian