The title of Marina Kastalskaya’s new series of works is an old Russian word, which is hardly used in contemporary Russian. In fact it concerns perfectly utilitarian objects – boxes made out of cardboard – transformed by the artist’s gesture. As well as its surrounding aura of the packaged, utilised, used object, the material itself has evolved diversely and has been covered by a multitude of contexts in the history of Contemporary Art. Kastalskaya chooses her own way of using this material, which does not correlate with any of the well-known, but in the first place is built into the personal path of the artist – the creator of the most varied practice and mythology of working with paper, and all that is connected with it, on Russian soil. Techniques and materials characteristic for her art are used in “Boxes”, – primarily a paper mass, and also tracing paper, cotton-based paper, scotch tape, artificial leather, sand and various inventive means – from tempera and acrylic to felt-tip pens and wax crayons. Thus, in this project many of the techniques and methods, which used to be present in Marina’s work separately, are reunited on a new level. Here the three-dimensionality of the boxes allows one to take the works beyond the limits of the easel painting form, to give them the appearance of an object, in reality an original new sculpture, with roots going back simultaneously both to painting and graphics, to which some of Kastalskaya’s previous projects strove.



One of the distinctive features of the project is the combination of the symbolic elements of painting and of texts. But even works not containing text appear objectless and devoid of concrete content only at first glance. It is always not just implied, but is clearly, calculatedly present in the artist’s works, uniting in a whole the layers of sacral and everyday meanings and actions, classical motives with the contemporary.