Elena Bulycheva – Artist Statement

In my Artistic practice I experimenting with boundaries of painting, exploring questions what is painting today and how it has shaped our gendered vision of art values. Making art with the help of a washing machine is the critical reconsidering of connection between aesthetics, domestic labor and everyday life. I put washing practices in the place of mediums to explore the limits of both art and simple domestic tasks.

Over the course of my artistic life , I tried to overturn methods that engage a variety of traditional and non-traditional processes that become material basis for stereotypes in the art world. At first I experimented with the surface of painting by washing it, and now I’m focused on form of the canvas to define the boundaries of painting.

I am challenging the formalization of rectangular shape of paintings and questioned the constraints of two-dimensionality. I understand the canvas as the locus of interplay between many social contexts and its values.-  At first I washed my art as a protest action in 2015. I have fought against the idea of high art. Women’s art has always been considered in this binary opposition as low art. so I want to get away from this.