The twelve plates that form the installation are arranged on a table. Behind them, a painting hangs like a curtain, completing the mise-en-scene and inviting us to come closer and feast our eyes on what has been served. Each plate carries a fragment drawn from the work of a recognised master. These are not miniature reproductions of entire paintings, but partial encounters: a gaze, a hand, a fold of fabric, a moment of light. They offer just enough to awaken the palate, sharpen our appetite and feed our sight. The rest of the image remains elsewhere, just out of reach. What we are given is a small portion of a much larger inheritance.
Gathered around the table, the fragments present art as something rare and concentrated. It cannot be taken in all at once; it asks for slowness, attention and appetite. Viewers are invited to approach the installation almost as they would approach a meal: one plate at a time, noticing detail, texture, memory and desire.
The work also responds to the haste of contemporary life, in which information, images and content are swallowed all at once, driven by the fear of missing out. Here, by contrast, we are asked to slow down and savour each fragment – to consider the memories it evokes, what it makes us feel and what it might lead us to remember or share.
There is something intimate in this gesture. Painting is no longer distant or untouchable; it becomes something placed before us, something around which we can gather. Food of Sight turns looking into a ritual of tasting, suggesting that art can nourish us precisely because it can never be fully consumed.
Kristina Purshina (b. 1987, Leningrad) is a Russian artist who lives and works in Moscow. Her practice encompasses painting, biomaterials, drawing, installation and found objects. She graduated from the Contemporary Art programme at the Stroganov Moscow State Academy of Arts and Industry and studied at ICA Moscow. Her practice treats painting as a space between memory and imagination, employing different materials to trace slips in perception, visual distortions and the fragile ways in which we try to remember. Her works draw on a form of nostalgia that feels both personal and shared, constructed from fragments of collective memory.
Text by Maria Myasnikova