About
CV
Work
- Paintings
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Paper-cuts and papier-mâché sculptures
- Featured Works: Rabbit Boys
In her work, Aglaia Gronas touches on memory and nostalgia. The recollection of colors, photographs, and other objects lost, opens up a world of kitsch. In it, the artist lays bare the structures of collectivity and the violence of the familiar.
In her novel “The Museum of Unconditional Surrender”, Dubravka Ugrešić connects memory and nostalgia to material. A photograph becomes the entry-point to a society that is no more. The elevation of everyday-objects, the exaggeration of memory into kitsch, is what connects her to Aglaia Gronas. Their works meet in forming a structure for many people and their many experiences.
A gaze disconnected from what's visible, turned inwards. A boy wearing rabbit ears holds onto himself, a small toy soldier in his hands.
Gronas’ ‘Rabbit Boys’ series is inspired by the Soviet tradition of New Year matinees in Kindergartens and schools. The costumes, consisting of dark shorts, a white top, and rabbit ears would be meticulously hand-crafted by the children’s parents. The tradition’s innocence, and also the unassuming toy soldier in the boys hands, take on a different quality under the subjects facial expressions. While the toy is but a small detail, it obviously serves as the paintings main force. A gateway forward, a foreshadowing of a system’s expectations.
In the shadow of the russian invasion of Ukraine, of the militarization of a country and its people, this once-innocent New Years ritual takes on a poignant quality. Where indoctrination seeps into the family and their children’s education, Gronas highlights the fragility of identity under the pressure of inherited violence. The family as the nucleus of societies gone rogue, the kernel of a universal imagined stability.
Born into a family of eight, the turbulent environment of a home is fundamental to the artist's work. The way identities are shaped in and through families. The sharing of space, the living next to – and on top of – each other, the daily negotiation that accompanies siblings competing for limited space and attention. The invigorating feeling of having escaped paired with a nostalgia for shelter. The meaning of what constitutes a home is approached through the lens of migration. How to build a home in a new place when the home is what was purposely left behind? By confronting these layers of feeling, Aglaia Gronas uncovers perspectives of the interior, of a world left behind, remembered and rebuilt.
In the ‘Leftover Pigment’ series, the artist looks at a particular shade of green that covers many interiors across post-Soviet countries. The color, originally produced for painting tanks and military equipment, was repurposed for civil use after the second world war, finding its way in everyday spaces. Covering the hallways of apartment blocks and school buildings, the walls of dormitories and hospitals, the color becomes the background to memories. A mothers embrace and a first kiss are enveloped by this green.
The widespread use of this color and the architectural similarity of apartment buildings in post-soviet countries makes this exploration especially interesting, While the artist's memories are personal, the environment in which they take place isn’t. Reproducing this environment, the stairways painted in green, is to reproduce something collective, a fragment of so much individual but shared experience. Originally used to camouflage military equipment, the paint is transformed into a unifying backdrop to recollection.
In her papier-mâché works, the artist presupposes notes, immigration documents, and sketches, transforming memory into something new. As Ugrešić starts her reconstruction of a country lost with a photograph of strangers, Aglaia Gronas builds new worlds out of what's discarded. The papier-mâché birds she creates gather as if to build their own world, a new way of being together, a new collectivity.
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Eric Mathias Wesermann