Margarita Gluzberg
Margarita Gluzberg’s practice, centred on drawing, expands to photography, performance, sound and film installation – as seen in her recent Wellcome Trust project, Rock On Bones. Gluzberg draws upon historical events, semi-biographical stories, and eclectic cultural references to create visually charged environments that summon memories of the past and negotiate aspects of contemporary existence.
These five drawings, made during the Lockdown and at night (the only time Gluzberg had to work) are an attempt to reconstruct the five Platonic Solids without precise mathematical measurements. These fundamental geometric polyhedron forms are historically charged with significance. Trying to draw them was for Gluzberg a way of slowly navigating what seemed to be familiar yet incomprehensible – a meditation on the current state of things in the world.
She says of the project: “My partner has a severe neurological illness and the Tower Hamlets NHS Neuro Team are remarkable at trying to find ways through the most complex dilemmas that face our family..”
Margarita Gluzberg, Five Vague Platonic Solids – Icosahedron, Cube, Dodecahedron, Octahedron, Tetrahedron, 2020, graphite on paper
Octahedron, Icosahedron and Tetrahedron from Five Vague Platonic Solids series, Margarita Gluzberg - on display in Newham University Hospital emergency department staff well-being room
Born in Moscow, Margarita Gluzberg has lived in London since 1979. She studied at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford and the Royal College of Art, and over the last two decades, her work has been shown at major international contemporary art spaces. Gluzberg has also had an extensive teaching career – most recently Reader in Contemporary Visual Production at the Royal College of Art and then Senior Lecturer at the Royal Academy Schools, the post she currently holds.
