ARCO Lisboa 2023
25th – 28th of May 2023
OPENING SECTION curated by Chus Martinez and Luiza Teixeira de Freitas

The marvelous capacity to be transformed’ is the motto of this years invited ‘Opening’ section of the renowned international Art Fair ARCO in Portugal’s sizzling capital Lisbon. Galerie3 introduces two upcoming artists, who live and work in Austria.

Anna Khodorkovskaya (*1985) takes a very individual approach towards transformation in her watercolor series “One Anna a Day.” With great lightness, lots of humor as well as a good portion of seriousness and self-reflection, she conjures self-portraits on paper in various formats paper. In the course of her daily practice, she has lost interest in a realistic image of herself and moved to focus on transformation and options. She poses the question “Who is Anna” and answers back in watercolor “everybody can be Anna”.

Khodorkovskaya, who also realizes works in public space and the municipality, often as part of collectives, is best known for her mosaic-works. Her play with words and letters as well as her humorous reflection of the world of art and design form part of her work, crossover the different techniques she is mastering. Every presentation of her repertoire of mosaic works and punctuations allow for the transformation of meanings. The artist favors exhibition settings, where the audience participates in the hanging and rehanging of her works, creating new meanings.

Maria Legat’s (*1980) typical format are very large-scale canvases directly pinned to the wall with many nails. With a self-crafted long charcoal stick and transparent color, the Austrian painter creates scenes, spaces, and new hybrid beings. We see the figures bearing, lifting, and morphing with their environment. Her work often triggers the viewers ambivalence, oscillating between the feeling of danger and sensitivity. Once seen, her paintings are rarely forgotten. Legat’s large works assert a certain timelessness, while at the same time being highly present and contemporary.

Legat’s artistic work starts with processing the current state of the world. She spends long periods of time dedicated to offline-input, reading and refection in her light flooded studio in the Austrian countryside, before she directly starts drawing with her charcoal-stick on the big canvases. “Starting a painting for me means a lot of decision making”, she says. Without prior sketching, Legat draws on the pinned linen. Using colors in her characteristic unique self-mixed color palette is her last step. Maria Legat’s works are numbered with an abbreviation of the series title “and about the state of the world” (Und zur Lage der Welt - UZLDW), a title, which carries at its core, the idea of ongoing transformation.