Born 1991 in Belovo, Russia
Currently based in Leipzig, Germany

EDUCATION

2021-23
MFA Painting – Teaching Certificate
Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD
LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting

2014-20
Diploma of Fine Arts
Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, Germany
Painting class of Prof. Annette Schröter

2010-14
Free University of Berlin, Germany
Film Studies/ Comparative Literature

EXHIBITIONS

Solo/ Two-Person
2023 Echoes, C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore, MD (with Ara Ko)
2020 Flow, UG Halle 14, Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig, Germany (Solo)

Group Shows
2023
Constellations, The Peale Museum, Baltimore, MD
Construction | Deconstruction, Zo Gallery, Baltimore, MD
2022
We are not Similar, Riggs and Leidy Galleries, Baltimore, MD
2021
Eyes in the Light, Riggs and Leidy Galleries, Baltimore, MD
2020
Tapetenwerk Teilt, Halle C01 Tapetenwerk, Leipzig, Germany
Tendencies 2.0, Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, Germany
2019
Mehrzahl, Werkschauhalle, Baumwollspinnerei, Leipzig, Germany
2018
Pretty Park, Weißes Haus, Markkleeberg, Germany
2017
Klasse Klasse, Halle C01 Tapetenwerk, Leipzig, Germany

AWARDS
2024-25
Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship, Provincetown, MA
2022
Graduate Research Development Grant, Maryland Institute College of Art
DAAD German Academic Exchange Service Study Scholarship – USA
Fulbright Silvermine Artist Residency, Silvermine Arts Center, New Canaan, CT
2021
Fulbright Study Scholarship – USA
Merit Scholarship, Maryland Institute College of Art
Hoffberger Fellowship, LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting
2020
Denkzeit Scholarship, Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen

PUBLICATIONS

2023
Quentin Gibeau, Bmore Art – Material Language: Ara Ko and Elena Kovylyaeva at C. Grimaldis Gallery: https://bmoreart.com/2023/04/material-language-ara-ko-and-elena-kovylyaeva-at-c-grimaldis-gallery.html

Elena Kovylyaeva – Echoes, Catalogue funded by the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting

ARTIST STATEMENT

I prowl through the field of vision like a cat stalking its prey, unseen and unheard. I sneak up to the fluid edges of the field of vision that doesn’t stop where the peripheral view reaches its outermost edges, but expands infinitely. It is impossible to look directly at what is hovering on the threshold outside the field of vision. My process is about capturing something fleeting that by definition will always stay ephemeral. You can vaguely sense its presence, like in a dream, but chasing it directly is impossible. I approach the edges on tiptoes, and there I cast my nets. On my journey, I catch something that remains on the fabric and bring it into focus by making it palpable. It is embodied as a petrified imprint on a soft textile surface.

I soak fabric with plaster in most of my works,. It makes the soft permeable textiles become stiff, as if covered in a thick layer of ice. The works look like dry birch bark, stripped from their tree bodies. The plaster envelops the material from both sides and makes it fragile and breakable. It creates intriguing folds and bumps, soft waves and rough areas with meandering flowing rhythms, thick opaque hills next to sheer vanishing materials. The white plaster surface is speckled with colors and pieces of torn collaged paper. Not everything sits on the surface. Translucent areas suggest that there is something behind that stays hidden. Paint seeps through the cracks of the breaking material from behind.

The poverty of the cheap, repurposed domestic textiles I use, paired with the luxurious decadence of the pigments, creates a harsh contrast. Making something cheap and disposable into something lush and precious is an attempt to strive for abundance where there was none. Fabrics like bed sheets and curtains bring a connotation of the domestic realm into my work. Bringing soft textiles into a space is supposed to make it feel inviting and homey. A space without soft materials is filled with echoes and feels cold and empty. My textile works hang like skin on the wall. Craquelures look like furrows and wrinkles on the skin’s surface. Besides red, brown and green tones reminiscent of bruised flesh, a cosmetic pink sits on the surface and doesn’t permeate the plaster, like makeup on a corpse. It’s as if it tries to decorate the dead tissue, to cover the rotting that takes place underneath and make it appear alive. It also recalls how, in Metamorphoses, Echo’s skin shrivels up and her body wastes away from sorrow when she is deprived of her love, with no possibility of her desire being fulfilled. My works are echoes of each other, ricocheting in the space from wall to wall. Pink pigment and strong textures are embedded in shriveled up pieces of fabric that are deprived of their softness, like echoes of past desires. Covering the walls with textiles should make a space inviting. But trying to make a space into a home becomes a hopeless endeavor when home is always somewhere else, intangible, sometime in the past.

In my work, the textile, the domestic and the pink – that still carry connotations of femininity – take up space immodestly. As the walls fill up with the pink and you are enveloped in it, at first, the strong color might be overwhelming, seem almost threatening. But as you get accustomed to it, you realize its underlying vulnerability. The work is mortally wounded, it’s crumbling and passing before your eyes. It seems to be looming up in a loud grandiose gesture, but precarity is its essence.

The work is finished when it’s overripe, on the edge between solidity and deterioration. From the beginning it is already doomed to waste away. It is not meant to last, its surface crumbles. The fading away is part of its DNA and built into the creative process. I try to preserve it. Carefully, I massage glue into the pores of the plaster to make the unstable fragile surface more durable, I try to preserve the material that is trying to escape its support. Every new work starts with the remnants of a deteriorated previous piece. And every new piece leaves something behind. I keep and utilize every last bit of material.

I call my process of preservation in fabric “mummification.” I mummify traces of something ephemeral that doesn’t have a body (anymore). My decision making is in realizing what state is worth preserving. I breathe life into deteriorating trashy materials, I embed a rhythm into them, and prolong their lives by making them into sensual precious objects. Mummification was used to preserve the bodies of royalty, while I mummify materials that weren’t supposed to last. Materials that weren’t supposed to be luxurious or cared for are being preserved past their life expectancy and revived as carriers of feeling. On the one hand, this process can be seen as a revival. But on the other hand, mummification is preserving something dead. It’s ending a natural life cycle, it stops the decay, so in a way I am sucking the life out of the material.

My works often evoke associations with landscapes, but I like to see them as gardens. As enclosing is an important part of my work process, I specifically read them as enclosed gardens, hortus conclusus. In my process, I layer plaster and paper in the center of a piece of fabric and then close its sides and attach them tightly to the surface. But they don’t stay enclosed. I tear them open. Opening up is a vulnerable act of revealing the private soft insides, but it’s also an almost violent intrusion, because in the opening movement the insides are torn apart. The paper on the surface tears uncontrollably, the plaster is ripped out of its support. Where, traditionally, the enclosure in hortus conclusus relates to virginity and innocence, in my pieces there is an intrusion, a deflowering of the garden, a tearing hymen, loss of innocence.

The uncontrollable factors of my process, like the pouring of plaster or the tearing of paper, have a philosophical urgency to me. Maybe the bumpy plaster surface is a perfect miniature replica of a cutout of the crust of some distant planet in a specific moment in time. Maybe if the plaster were poured a million times, the surface would come out exactly the same way at some point in infinity. But for the moment it cannot be replicated. Maybe its inability to ever be replicated makes it the record of something precious and unique, or maybe it’s just meaningless in its randomness. That means that either it’s so random that you decide to not pay attention to it, or maybe the consequence of the randomness could be the realization that nothing is truly random and that you have the freedom to give everything a sense of meaningfulness, that everything in its essence is held together by the flowing forces of contingency.

We see an endless images throughout the day that leave us indifferent and don’t affect us in the slightest way. But a painting can trigger a different state of mind. The painting guides the eye through composition, texture, color, light and shadow. Looking becomes an active process and not an instantaneous passive consumption. Then it affects the body. You start to understand the materiality of the surface and imagine the marks being traces or indexes of a movement. And then you’re guided to an affect as the result of the extended looking process.

On the one hand, my works can be read as images. They have the suggestion of a composition. But as the eye is guided around the surface, you can get lost in the details of its material qualities. While the works do not suggest a subjective hand whose movements you could trace, the surface seems to be demanding to be touched. It provokes a reaction on a visceral level, that is not purely visual and solely created in the brain, but that comes in directly through the body. The perception enters through two different senses at the same time that are combined into something in between – touching with the eyes, looking through the hand.

It creates a sensual experience that comes very close to a kind of eroticism lying in the fetishization of the haptic material. This triggers a peculiar excitation of the senses that stays suspended, as the viewer is not awarded the gratification of actual touching. You are tempted to touch it, but you would risk destroying the delicate plaster surface, which creates a feeling of preciousness and precariousness. It triggers a fear of decay, of the volatility of the material state, and at the same time, a sense of joy as the work invites the viewer to appreciate its fleeting beauty the urgency of its temporality as it is about to disperse.

It reminds us that we have a body, that we are not only beings of the mind, that the body is not only there to carry the head around. The knowledge that we gain through the immediate perception of the body on an instinctual level is as valid as an intellectualized understanding of the world. We can feel everything at once in our bodies. We are perishable and alive, solid and concrete but also permeable and porous, sensual and disembodied, thinking and feeling at the same time. In that sense, I believe that making art and looking at art provides an escape from the trap of solipsism. It’s a reciprocal exchange with a concrete haptic object that lies outside ourselves, that is enriched with meaning, providing a shared feeling of being moved and being touched, a dialogue with the ether that surrounds and contains all of us.