Julia Kissina’s ink drawings on paper feature scenes, faces, and credits. Similar to the artist’s previous works, such as the Dead Artists Society (a composite work of performance, text and drawing), these drawings reflect rituals, religious practice, conspiracies and other cultural phenomena, related to mystical or magical thinking in aesthetics, history and politics.
Julia Kissina. Born in Kiev • Masters in Art from the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich • taught as a Professor of New Media and Art Photography
Solo exhibitions
2022 Brandenburg Museum of Modern Art, Cottbus, Germany
2022 Phantom Gallery Project on Union Square, New York
2021 Julia Kissina, Gallery BB. Art colony Wedding. Berlin
2020 Chicken-Party. Kunstsalon Doelberg. Goslar
2018 Conspiracy. Gallery BB. Art colony Wedding. Berlin
2017 Metaphysics vs. Politics #3. Project by Julie August. Berlin/Buenos Aires
2016 Komplexraum #15. General Public. Berlin
2015 Metaphysics versus Politics #2. Gallery BLA. Art colony Wedding. Berlin.
2014 Animal magnetism. Gallery Brian Herlihy. County Kerry. Ireland
2013 Secret Rituals. Julia Kissina and Caro Suerkemper. Hartwig Gallery. Ruegen
2012 Komplexraum #2. Julia Kissina and Lucy Powell. General Public. Berlin
2011 Meteorites on the Sledges. Berlin-Weekly Gallery
• Metaphysics vs. Politics. Factory (4th Moscow Biennale)
..´Beyond humor, the liberating attitude associated with irony, Kissina offers little in the way of a future. It doesn’t mean she is acceptant of the situation, only that her visual outbursts demonstrate the hopeless anger of integrity. Despite their comic aspect, these drawings are brilliant descriptions of a world gone wrong. But we remember we are looking at art–at a version of the real. Our hope is based on the simple pursuit of art. If there is something inherently grim within Kissina’s vision, there is also the human comedy softening our impulse to dismiss human motives. For example, considering the woman whose buttocks are placed so that they are facing us, and considering hybrid creatures whose imaginative existence, let alone their reality, gives us pause, our only remedy may be a tragicomic response. The question of what to do remains, but the answer is not immediately available. Indeed, it doesn’t look like the quandary can be solved–even the “enlightened” pursuit of art is in doubt, although Kissina’s use of that word gives us a hope we deserve to have. Her trenchant hand and skeptical eye offer us a mirror reflecting the way we are, disposed as we are to desire, power, creatures beyond imagining, and the imagination that publicly recognizes them. ´-- -Tussle Art Magazine, New York by Jonathan Goodman, August 11, 2021