Tribeca, New York
Alexandra Kadzevich
Through Fine-Spun Golden Halos
ThetaTheta is delighted to present an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by the Ukrainian artist Alexandra Kadzevich. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in the US. For Alexandra Kadzevich, perception is not a passive absorption, but an active selection: a slippery starting point that finds its shape in memory. Throughout her practice––which encompasses painting, sculpture, assemblage, video, and texts––the artist elaborates on dislocations large and small––from profound transformations to faint errors of logic. She distills and reinterprets instabilities in material space that define the visible world, and through which the ripple of real life breaks. In dreams, architecture and objects situate us, and serve as clues in a plot that our unconscious carries out, to uncertain ends. Upon waking, the details tend to dissolve in our conscious recollections, leaving us with arbitrary contours of general points of recognition. So, too, can our lived experiences elude us: disparate fragments of images enriched by varying degrees of abstraction become reconfigured into a broader narrative of memory. Kadzevich was a recent expatriate from her home country in 2022 when she began finding pictures of mirrors for sale on OLx, a Ukrainian website for selling used items, and working them into her paintings. They are collective records of a place receding from her uncertainly, taking and losing form in selected reflections, as small gestures map out ideas of home. Kadzevich recasts found objects in space like actors in a slow play, fluctuating between delicate arrangement and broad-stroke gestures. In sculptures made from antique armchairs and umbrella canes, Kadzevich turns disused materials into portals from memory to another reality. Her paintings, interconnected yet opposing one another, form an expansive virtual architecture for these sylphlike sculptures to carry out their choreographies across the floor. Minute quotidian decisions, like the way a door is opened or a cane is angled, can reroute entire trajectories of perception. Kadzevich explores the grandeur of divergent possibilities by softly focusing on the sum of traces we leave behind, or are left with. The goal, she says, is to get out of the way and let these things be themselves, and to find ourselves somewhere else entirely. Alexandra Kadzevich (b. 1992, Odesa, Ukraine) lives and works in Berlin. She graduated from the Grekov Odesa Art School in 2013 and completed a two-year residency at De Ateliers, Amsterdam in 2023. She had a solo presentation with Theta at Paris Internationale in 2024. Recent exhibitions have been held at: Hoast, Vienna and PinchukArtCentre, Kyiv (both 2024); Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Scotland; and De Ateliers, Amsterdam (both 2023); Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2022); The Naked Room Gallery, Kyiv; Dymchuk Gallery, Kyiv; and M17 Contemporary Art Center, Kyiv (all 2021).