Artissima 2025: Margarita Gluzberg
Overview
Booth DS6
For our participation in Artissima 2025, and coinciding with the artist’s election as a Royal Academician, Alma Pearl will present a solo exhibition of works on paper by Margarita Gluzberg (b. 1968). Conceived specifically for the Disegni Section of the fair curated by Irina Zucca Alessandrelli, these drawings continue the artist’s ongoing series created entirely from an individual set of pencils sourced from a now-defunct Soviet factory—this particular set originating from a factory named after the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. These compositions unfold in layered, softly contoured forms that merge and overlap. Expansive fields of burgundy, umber, crimson, and other colours and tones intersect and are interwoven with each other, generating luminous zones of chromatic intensity. The velvety, atmospheric surface reveals a gradual accumulation of marks—pigment built through repetitive gestures until colour becomes at once dense and translucent.
In these drawings, the act of making is inseparable from the medium itself. Each pencil/colour is used to its very end, consumed in a durational process that is as much performance as drawing. The resulting works emerge from a tension between the machinic and the spiritual: mechanical repetition that nonetheless channels a near-automatic flow, recalling Surrealist écriture automatique. The marks hover between script, image, and transmission and suggest something received rather than authored. Through the circular rhythm, these resurrected pencils complete their lifecycle as they are worn down in the very act of preservation.
In these drawings, the act of making is inseparable from the medium itself. Each pencil/colour is used to its very end, consumed in a durational process that is as much performance as drawing. The resulting works emerge from a tension between the machinic and the spiritual: mechanical repetition that nonetheless channels a near-automatic flow, recalling Surrealist écriture automatique. The marks hover between script, image, and transmission and suggest something received rather than authored. Through the circular rhythm, these resurrected pencils complete their lifecycle as they are worn down in the very act of preservation.
In this significant body of work, Gluzberg interrogates and expands the very essence of the medium–materially, symbolically, and culturally–while engaging with art historical frames that drawing has explored: from Surrealism to abstract and spiritual applications in the works of Hilma af Klint, Helen Frankenthaler, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee.
