Margarita Gluzberg's Otherwhere at Alma Pearl

Alma Pearl, Unit T, Reliance Wharf, 2-10 Hertford Road, London N1 5ET
3 November 2023 – 13 January 2024

Back in July, Apollo magazine published an article that named ten new commercial galleries that had opened in London so far this year. An extraordinary flowering of new enterprises was heralded after the raw pandemic years. Of the several that have joined stalwarts of the East End scene like Maureen Paley, Stuart Shave/ModernArt and The Approach is Alma Pearl, located by the canal in Haggerston. 

Debuting at the end of April, Alma Pearl’s first two shows – Positions I and II were group exhibitions selected by writer and critic John Slyce. Margarita Gluzberg’s current solo exhibition is a natural progression from this. 

Gluzberg was born in Moscow in 1968 and moved to the UK at the age of ten. Her childhood in Soviet Russia was long enough to leave a deep psychological imprint, and much of her work in the last 15 years has been a negotiation between acute, contrasting experiences of East and West.  Arriving in London from the dour environment of Moscow, Gluzberg’s first projects were clandestine photographs of the glittering shop window displays in Bond Street. Her 2008 exhibition, The Money Plot at Paradise Row in Bethnal Green, featured paintings of luxury goods, the UBS London trading floor and the soaring cast ironwork of the covered markets in Leeds. Her exploration through these images of capital and the profligate superabundance of material goods in the West carried an implicit echo of the unfulfilled desires of her childhood self, for bubble gum and blue jeans. 

There is only one figurative work in the current show: a 2017 black and white drawing of the neatly turned ankle and foot of a woman. The source of the image was a photograph taken at a Christian Dior fashion show in Red Square in 1959, part of Krushchev’s initiative to “thaw” relations with the West. All the other drawings in the show are abstract, going back to the first principles of art lessons in Soviet Russia that taught children to draw a circle and then, by shading it, turn it into a sphere. 

Neither geometric abstraction, nor Christmas baubles nor soap bubbles, the forms in Gluzberg’s drawings shimmer between two and three dimensionality. Their intensely worked surfaces glow with colour; highlights make the eye seek a solid sphere that refuses to materialise completely. 

In conversation at the gallery with Daniel Birnbaum, Gluzberg described the difficulties of her life through the pandemic years, which culminated in the death of her husband after a long illness. This new body of work, then, is a deliberate move to separate herself from content, from a research-based methodology that the internet renders too easy. But, she emphasises, these drawings are ‘not about nothing’ nor are they are a form of therapy, even though they emerge from a period of personal crisis and unhappiness. 

Worked variously on canvas and on paper, the second constraining principle that the artist has deployed is the use of the restricted palette of colours in found sets of pastels. One set is her own, from her teenage years; another is American from the 1960s, another Polish from the 70s. The strict parameters of form and colour offered a freedom to explore, not merely to create beautiful things, though beautiful they are. “Abstraction can communicate the universe” Gluzberg states, tying herself back to such famous predecessors as Kandinsky and Hilma aft Klint. She has referred to the spheres as ‘chambers’, locations perhaps in which to negotiate her relationship with her past. The title of the exhibition, ‘Otherwhere’ denotes this creation of a space for reflection for the artist, away from the clamour of external influences, rather than a sense of escapism. The chambers become the carriers of memory, touchstones of identity, glowing, meditative mandalas.

As we approach the end of this year, 2023 having been grim in so many ways, I find myself surprisingly open to engaging with work that operates in this very different register. Behind Gluzberg’s rigorously simple forms and numinous colours, tectonic plates of 20th century geo-politics and 21st century pandemics silently collide and overlap each other. The drawings conjure a deeply human space of emotion, strong and forward looking while simultaneously cradling the past within the present. Highly recommended.

Caroline Douglas
Director

Alma Pearl
Unit T, Reliance Wharf, 2-10 Hertford Road, London N1 5ET
3 November 2023 – 13 January 2024
Opening Times: Wednesday - Saturday from 12pm to 6pm
Exhibition open until 13 January 2024