Marina Popova Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1949 -

Born in 1949 in Moscow, Russia
Immigrated to Montréal, Québec in 1979
Sstudied at the Kiev College of Art (1965-1968); M.F.A., Moscow Institute of Textile and Design, Department of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia (1968-1973)


Marina Popova works with abstracted and geometric forms, using oil and watercolour paint, sometimes combining text with her images. Her use of abstraction points to a rebellion against the Russian Brezhnev era, which favoured representational art. As Popova has stated: "Abstractionism was completely bourgeois art and therefore had been banned by Stalin. It represented different thinking, which meant revolutionary thinking and therefore dangerous thinking" (1992). In the catalogue for Montréal-Moscou (1992), an exhibition of three female Montréal artists (Popova, Luba Genush and Natasha Wrangel) with connections to Soviet Europe, Vladimir Tseltner described her work as the combination of forms basic to universal order in "a massive charge of energy." In her 1993 work, Energy, this movement is portrayed by quickly-scribbled bold black lines over softer blooms of colour. In Through the Window of the same year, planes of colour intersect with sweeping arcs, forms seeming to jump out of forms, piling on top of each other. As Popova herself has explained: "I'm not copying the Russian avant-garde, I'm not interpreting them. I am in dialogue with them" (1992). Tseltner also makes a distinction between Popova and the avant-garde school from which her artwork sprang: "while they constructed form, she is constructing space [and] creates her own space. She builds it with a harmony and a unity" (1992). In this new continuation of the 1930s Russian movement that is adapted to the chaos of the 1990s, Popova is trying to reclaim the movement that was interrupted by Stalin and which she considers to be, because of that interruption, "an unfinished act." Popova's work also includes sets and costumes for theatres in Edmonton, billboards, posters, and murals. Her murals appear in schools throughout Edmonton and also in Kiev, Ukraine, and several were commissioned by the Canadian architect Douglas Cardinal.