Artist: Lucia Sotnikova
Exhibition title: Stage Lights, Kitchen Nights
Venue: Berthold Pott, Cologne, Germany
Date: May 11 – July 3, 2024
Photography: ©AR / all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Berthold Pott, Cologne
Berthold Pott Gallery is pleased to present Lucia Sotnikova’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. It is entitled “Stage Lights, Kitchen Nights” and shows new photographic works from a series that she started in 2023.
In her works, the artist deals with topics such as transformation/fusion, beauty stereotypes, “mis-fittings”, sexualization, social role models, normalization and soft power.
In the first step of her work, the artist searches sales advertisements on online-platforms with photos of used toys offered there, taken by the owner, such as Barbie dolls, plastic horses and science fiction figures. The photos by the unknown authors demonstrate a particular directness and strikingness; at times the artist discovers an expression in them that is comparable to forensic photo documentation. All these images, in their pop culture style, show strong clichés of beauty or power and have found their way over decades into our lives, sometimes in a sexualized form. Stereotypical images of people normalize and influence society’s value systems: subtle manipulation (soft power) through the transmission of standardized images.
Lucia Sotnikova’s photographic works are now created by photographing herself, projecting these eBay ad photos in different ways onto her own body with the projector, “covering” these clichés, so to speak. This results in grotesque fusions of her own body with the bodies, shapes and colors of the toy dolls. Like a kind of transformation or metamorphosis, new body worlds emerge; real and projected, human and mass-produced plastic works are placed on top of and within each other.
In another installation-sculptural exhibition level, Lucia symbolically creates a similar multi-layered structure by designing a sculpture made from found radio antennas and placing it in the gallery space, which symbolically creates a kind of “radio stations”. Similar to a situation with several radios in the room, each playing different stations, and then symbiotically combining them again to create a new sound construct of their own.
This installation embodies the idea that in space we are always exposed to different messages, messages and impressions, which are often difficult to filter apart, but which lie over us, to which we are exposed and which change us day by day.
Lucia Sotnikova, born 1986 in Volgograd, RU, lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. She studied Fine Arts at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2012-2018) and has an M.A. with Honor in Exhibition Design, EDI at University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf (2010-2012). She also has a Diploma in Architecture, Volgograd State Architecture University (2002-2009).
Exhibitions 2024: Stage Lights, Kitchen Nights, solo exhibition at Berthold Pott, Cologne, Germany (May/June) / Size Matters, group show at Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Germany, including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Lucia Sotnikova, Bernd u. Hilla Becher, Sigmar Polke, Seth Price, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kathrin Sonntag, … / Face Time, group exhibition at Plus-One Gallery, Antwerp, BE, Nov 2023 – Jan 2024
Selected Past Exhibitions: Tilt Shift – Darmstädter Tage der Fotografie, Darmstadt, Germany (2023), Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2023), Michael Horbach Stiftung, Köln, Germany (2023), Berthold Pott, Cologne (2023), Richas Digest project space, Cologne (solo, 2022, 2020, 2017), Kunsthaus Essen, Germany (2022, group), Neue Galerie Gladbeck, Germany (2019, solo), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (2020, group), XBunker, Soenderborg, DK (2020 group), German Embassy London (Andreas Gursky, Lucia Sotnikova, Alex Romey), together with Sprüth Magers, Museum K21 (Planet 58), Düsseldorf (group, 2019), Goethe Institut Paris, France (2017, group), Kunstpalast Düsseldorf (2016, group), MIAC, Castillo de San Jose, Lanzarote, ES [Klasse Gursky, 2014 ] Tokio Hiyoshi, Tokio, JP 820 (2013, group), Kjubh Kunstverein e.V., Cologne, DE (2013, group), [ReKOLLEKT] Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien, Berlin, DE (2012, group).
