In-between series issues interactions between people and urban architecture. The places depicted are collected from both fragments of memory and imagination. It was important for me to design universal spaces that can be located anywhere. Dreamlike town squares, repeating arches and stairs become full-fledged heroes of the works, reflecting the inner world of a person who balances between movement and immobility, here and there.

Working on the series, my inspiration was the early metaphysical works of Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. I appreciate their atmosphere of melancholy and silence. The composition of one of the main works in my series ‘Emergence’ was based on his ‘The Enigma of the Oracle’. In my work I aimed to create the kind of painting that Giorgio de Chirico once compared with the flat surface of a perfectly calm ocean, which “disturbs us…by all the unknown that is hidden in the depth.”

Balancing delicate vital, earthly shades of peach-pink with metaphysical deep blues, I strive to capture the moment of the birth of movement, the acquisition of fragile balance. Just as in music a moment of silence makes neighboring chords more sonorous, these works are an attempt to capture the caesura — the moment between.


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Maria Kostareva