Maria Konstantinova, b.1953

Maria Konstantinova was born in Moscow in 1953. She is a painter, graphic and theatre designer, book illustrator and installation artist.  Maria Konstantinova studied at the well-known Moscow Intermediate School of Art, and graduated from the V I Surikov State Institute of Arts in 1980, having specialised in painting and theatre scenery.  The classic Soviet education, which otherwise placed strict boundaries on the themes and treatments available to art students, could not stifle Konstantinova’s individual style. This  dated from her school years and remained unchanged even after she joined a circle of conceptual artists and writers in the 1970s, chief amongst whom were Ilya Kabakov, Andrei Monastyrsky and the group “Collective Action”.

She differed from “official” and “unofficial” conceptual artists by her delicate fusion of traditional artistic talent; warm feminine creativity (rukodel’nosti); cold intellect; conceptual structure of her puzzle-paintings (kartin-golovolomok) and the audacity of her existential revelations. The aesthetic perfectionism and delicacy of her works paradoxically strengthens the darkness of certain images, as in the series with the Siamese twins, a much-favoured motif of Konstantinova’s representing the divisibility and dualism of the human ego. This subject appears in parts in the diptych based on the fairy-tale by the Russian romantic writer Antony Pogorel’sky “The Black Hen, or the Subterraneans”.

Maria Konstantinova participated in the many exhibitions of the “Moscow Conceptual School” such as Perspectives on Conceptualism (Moscow – Honolulu – New York – Raili, 1991-1993), and in exhibitions dedicated to gender issues, most recently Feminine Art. Women Russian Artists of the 15^th to 20^th Centuries (State Tretiakov Gallery, 2002).