Draft:Margarita Gluzberg

Margarita Gluzberg (born 1968) is a Russian-born British artist. Her work encompasses drawing, photography, painting, performance and sound installation. She first became known for her detailed black and white large-scale drawings. "Gluzberg has been making hair drawings since the 1990s, exploring this luscious surface beyond which lies the unknowable brain".

Biography

Margarita Gluzberg was born in Moscow, USSR. Her father is the novelist Zinovy Zinik. He emigrated to the West - she and her mother followed in 1979, settling in London. Becoming bilingual later influenced her performance lecture 'Simultaneous Translation Through a Mouth Without Organs' at Tate Britain.

While still at school in London, Gluzberg illustrated several children's books including Modge and Podge by Helen Muir.

Her first works to be reviewed in the press: a series of large scale wig drawings, were shown in 1997 as part of 'Bcc' a group exhibition curated by Andrew Renton. The ongoing series was later described by Michael Archer in Artforum as a 'singular and very hairy menagerie' in which 'boundaries are impossible to perceive[..] and yet everything is absolutely precise, represented distinctly on a surface that then strives to fold into and substantiate itself, rolling into and encroaching inquisitively on our own space.'

In 2004 Gluzberg was awarded the Wingate Scholarship at the British School at Rome where she spent six months.

Over the next two decades, Gluzberg's solo exhibitions explored desire and consumption, and the artist's own Soviet past. Sam Thorne wrote in Frieze magazine how: 'Gluzberg's drawings pinpoint this very Postmodern kind of desire, striving for a liminal space in which metaphor and materiality are confused'. Laura K Jones described her 2008 exhibition 'The Money Plot', Paradise Row, as 'a journey through the artist's Soviet childhood, when consumer lust was no doubt a constant for many'. In 'Avenue Des Gobelins', Paradise Row 2012, Gluzberg for the first time used photography to depict 'what we're always left with: the endless fug of desire itself.' In the words of writer Tom McCarthy: 'Avenue des Gobelins, charts a journey into capitalism—into a space of capitalism which is an imaginative, or imaginary space as much as a physical one.'

In 2009 Gluzberg was commissioned to create a new sound installation for the Paris Nuit Blanche. Since then, the work has become an ongoing research project into vinyl recordings of birdsong: the 'Captive Bird Society', that included a performances at the Wysing Arts Centre and an Artangel commission for Elizabeth Price's exhibition Slowdans in 2020.

In 2014, she was awarded a Welcome Trust Public Engagement Grant for her 'Rock on Bones' project which was realised through a series of performance lectures including the De La Warr Pavilion, and culminating in 'Bones' – a multimedia event at the Royal College of Art where she was at the time, Reader In Contemporary Visual Production.

Gluzberg was appointed Senior Lecturer at The Royal Academy Schools, Royal Academy of Arts in 2018.

In 2020, during the global pandemic Gluzberg was invited to contribute to the #100NHSRooms  project with new geometric drawings. For her most recent solo exhibitions in London–'Proper Time' at Karsten Schubert (2022), and 'Otherwhere' at Alma Pearl (2023), Gluzberg developed these geometric works into a series of pastel sphere drawings, that the philosopher Federico Campagna described to be a practice where: 'Each drawing brings back to life the previous one and allows the next one to take place. The chain of repetitions can be potentially infinite.'