Maria Agureeva

Born in 1985 in Moscow. Graduated from the St. Petersburg State University of Technology and Design, faculty of graphic design (2009). Since 2007 she has been a member of the IFA Creative Union of Artists, St. Petersburg.

The Olympic slogan and the key concept in contemporary critical theory are combined in the name of Maria Agureeva’s project “Citius, Altius, Fortius! Commodification.” Maria Agureeva reveals an element of public erotic display in Soviet sports and researches its metastasis in post-Soviet daily life, where the market has taken the role of ideology and the contemplation of the sporting body has been commodified and turned into a good.
Maria seeks the expressive possibilities of oil on canvas. She paints clothes on the naked bodies of models, photographs them and then transfers the images to tiles. From a distance we can see the girlish bodies on a bright background and can discern the specific forms of temptation. Up close we find a game with visual codes. The painted bodies imitate pictures and in this sense they become objects to be photographed. The ceramic tiles suggest the hygienic spaces where Masha’s characters reside. Acoustic ready-mades recorded in the showers at sport clubs supplement the images. Soviet sporting events are the space of sporting objectification.